Methodology

Since 2006 BIOCOM AG has been providing an overview of the German biotech sector for the information platform biotechnologie.de, based on the OECD definition of biotechnology as it was first described and globally standardised in 2004 (www.oecd.org). From 2006 until June 2015, the platform and the survey were financed by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, BIOCOM AG took over full responsibility for the platform and the report from July 2015.

For the purposes of this survey, BIOCOM AG has compiled a questionnaire compliant with the OECD standards as used in the previous surveys. Between January and March 2016, a total of 775 companies were contacted and asked to complete the survey. When deciding on selection of the company, the OECD definition was used alongside an adjustment in line with the company database at BIOCOM AG. 564 of the companies answered either by questionnaire or by telephone, corresponding to a verification rate of 72.3%.

In accordance with the OECD guidelines, when selecting companies to participate, extreme care was taken to include all enterprises which are resident in Germany and which are active in biotechnology. As a result, companies that are majority-owned from outside Germany but have a company office with R&D activities in Germany were also considered. When surveying the employee figures, number of companies and fields of activity, the survey included only the German locations of a company. If an enterprise had more than one location in Germany, only cumulated figures and data for the company as a whole were considered.

With regard to the clinical pipeline of the dedicated biotech companies, special care was taken in this survey to represent the core development activities in this survey – especially in the early clinical development when a wide range of drug candidates are tested in different indications and formulations. For this reason, the report does not include all R&D projects, but focuses on the number of active compounds the company has in phase I and II tests.

With regard to counting newly founded companies, care was taken to compare the data of the current period under review with the data of the period under review of the previous year. This strategy has to be used to obtain a coherent picture because a steady number of new firms emerge continuously throughout the year. Due to the time-consuming founding procedures, the majority of start-ups are only officially registered as new companies a year or more after their initial founding.

The deadline for completion of the survey was 31.12.2015, for counting the start-ups 31.3.2016. Participating companies can be viewed in the biotechnology database at biotechnologie.de. All data published herein is based on the results of the survey. The database also offers an overview of biotechnological research in Germany. Every scientific institute or establishment can be searched for within the database according to a variety of criteria.