06.05.2011

Recruiting Appeal

Adlershof's JPT Peptide Technologies GmbH is expanding

More than one third of all JPT employees are scientists.

JPT Peptide Technologies GmbH can also rely on the location’s appeal in its search for new recruits. “We find that Adlershof today provides an attractive environment: everything fits,” confessed Holger Wenschuh, JPT Managing Director. This biotech company with forty employees including fifteen scientists is a successful provider of peptide arrays, complex synthetic peptide libraries, and innovative peptide based services for applications in the fields of vaccine development, biomarker research, and drug development.

In 2001, the company JPT was spun off from Jerini AG and set up under its present name in 2004. That year also saw the start of the search for a new location, recalled Wenschuh, a widespread action that finally concluded in Adlershof. “Here was the best support for our technical requirements,” he explained when asked for the motives behind his relocation to the technology park in 2006. “The premises and the equipment were of greater import to us than the proximity to the university and its research institutes and graduates,” he explained, adding that they had to invest about a million euros nonetheless.

JPT is presently pursuing its expansion strategy for its UTZ premises for environmental, bio-, and power technologies and is also setting up a clean room. The plans are for eight new employees. National and internet requests for applications are targeting potential recruits not only within the borders.

According to Wenschuh, JPT is looking for biologists, chemists, and biochemists with professional experience and “interesting profiles”, as he puts it. He added that over the last few years the company has always had between five and ten programme students from the region’s universities and other institutes of higher education.

The attraction that Adlershof radiates today also becomes clear in the search for new recruits. “In 2006 we thought the location was too remote for a sizeable benefit,” reflected Wenschuh. Today though, he continued, Adlershof has become an integral constituent of Berlin that has a particularly strong appeal to applicants abroad. “Today the science location is a familiar name far beyond Berlin’s borders. We don’t have to explain to anybody any more what it is.” He expects that the work starting on the motorway link will be continued when the new Berlin-Brandenburg International (BBI) Airport will be inaugurated. This too will make the search for new recruits easier.

by Klaus Oberzig

Link: www.jpt.com