Gonadotropins: a challenge won
Gonadotropins are hormones naturally produced by the pituitary gland that, once released into the blood, accumulate in urine, particularly abundantly in menopausal and pregnant women.
After the fire at the Massagno plant, Arturo Licenziati decided it was time to reinvent the company. Among the many options, he chose the one everyone advised against: investing in gonadotropins. Too complex, too expensive, too risky. A niche sector, destined – according to many – to disappear within ten years.
But Licenziati, as always, went against the tide. In Lamone, he built a tailor-made plant exclusively dedicated to the production of gonadotropins. Thus began one of the most daring industrial adventures in IBSA’s history. The heart of the process was thousands of kilometres away: in China, in the densely populated villages of the eastern coast, where hundreds of thousands of litres of urine were collected daily from menopausal women. A first processing step took place on-site, then the material – concentrated into a crude powder – arrived in Switzerland.
For every 600,000 litres collected, only 3 kg of useful powder reached Lamone. From there, after a rigorous and delicate process, over 200,000 vials of injectable medicine were produced. It was a complex supply chain, requiring high-level chemical, biological, and engineering expertise. But it worked.
In 2013, IBSA introduced another groundbreaking innovation: a new water-soluble formulation of progesterone, administered subcutaneously. It was unique on the global market. It simplified the lives of patients in Medically Assisted Reproduction (MAR) programmes, improving local tolerability and treatment adherence.
All this happened under the strictest rules: aseptic production conditions, continuous microbiological controls, heavy investments in sterile environments. One figure says it all: 1 m² of aseptic area costs six times more than 1 m² of packaging area. But IBSA never feared costs when the goal was quality.
Today, that courageous investment has become one of the pillars of the company’s growth: IBSA is among the top four companies worldwide in reproductive medicine. And it all started with a counterintuitive choice.