Peter Pohl: Sequencer of the lake

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Peter Pohl is Head of sequencing specialists GATC Biotech, headquartered in Konstanz. The management scientist loves the music of Gustav Mahler. Source: GATC Biotech AG

08.03.2011  - 

The company, family, continuity: At first glance, Peter Pohl's life appears well consolidated, predetermined even.On top of this, there is the (happy) spontaneous stroke of fate of being able to play a major role in his field. He wanted to be a musician out in the wider world, but hat actually came about was a medium-sized company on Lake Constance: The sequencing specialists GATC Biotech. So what links GATC, Gustav-Mahler, and Pohl? Answer: It’s all about the Pohl’s incredible energy, both in science and culture. “The verbal test in Konstanz was on Monday. On Wednesday I began with the orchestra in Vienna.”

It is not that the young Peter Pohl was lacking in prospects. The 29-year-old had just returned from Vienna. Three years after completing his degree in management science and thus ensuring that everything would run smoothly, the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra set off to tour the world. After this, he decided to perfect his French and Italian in just one year, and a career in arts management seemed fully mapped out. But then he was contacted by his brother Thomas, Head of the Gesellschaft für Analysetechnik und Consulting mbH, which was founded in 1990 by Pohl the Elder and his three sons, Thomas, Fritz, and Peter. “My brother said that there was a marketing problem where they could use my help,” remembers Pohl. It would take about two weeks, apparently. “After 14 years, I'm still here.” Today as the CEO of GATC Biotech AG. The “marketing problem” was that the company, at the time marketing a self-designed sequencer, needed to shift over completely to the service business.

Instrumentation facility with all the modern sequencing toys

The mission has been accomplished. In 2011 GATC Biotech is the European market leader in DNA sequencing. More than 120 people are employed at the facility, which is stocked with all the leading sequencing technologies, among others from Applied Biosystems, Pacific Biosciences, Roche, and Illumina. The pace of the industry is breakneck, and the price pressures immense. “For the sum we received 13 years ago for an order, we now have to sequence a 71,000-fold amount.” The prices drop by 20 percent every year, estimates Pohl. So how does the family company, in which the three brothers hold 98 percent of shares after the death of the father, cope with this trend? The magic word is ‘convenience’. What is meant by this is that somewhere in Europe, a researcher can finish his evening meal before dropping a sample into a GATC mailbox. Couriers quickly bring the material to one of a number of GATC laboratories. Work is then carried out through the night on the sample, and by the time the researcher is drinking his first cup morning coffee, the results will be downloadable from the GATC servers. Many thousand samples are dealt with on an ordinary night.

The idea came from within the company, a fitting example of how GATC Biotech has organically grown in its 20-year history. This is no dogma, but arose from the attitude of the three brothers. “We had a good dozen M&A negotiations,” says Pohl, “but the price expectations were always too high. We preffered to put our money into our own technology.” This is not the customary approach in an industry that was once a favourite dumping ground for venture capital.

DNA tests for prenatal diagnosis

That said, most competitors such as Lion Bioscience in Heidelberg, Genset in Paris, and Lark in the USA, are no longer with us in anything other than memory. Well-groundedness and pragmatism are in the GATC DNA. The first laboratory cost just 1,000 euros in its entirety. “We painted the 140 square meters ourselves, laid tiles, used old tables, second-hand pipettes, and got hold of a centrifuge used by the University of Konstanz,” says Pohl. The amateur wakeboarder and current Managing Director Pohl is now responsible for the company vision. The latest GATC project is also his baby: Two years ago, he founded the GATC subsidiary Lifecodexx, which develops its own diagnostic DNA tests for the prenatal field.

The former globetrotter Pohl now feels at home in Konstanz, “the last corner of Germany,” says the born Austrian. He does not miss the high-adrenalin world of concert tours, auditions with Claudio Abbado, and the gloss of high culture. “In classical music you play the songs more or less as they were played a hundred years ago,” says Pohl, who not only likes to hear Mahler, Brahms & Co, but also used to play as a clarinetist. “In the life sciences, you never know what will happen the next day. I like that.”

Autor: Christoph Mayerl