Quality of Medicines Award 2024 for Dr. Tim Menzen
The Frankfurt Foundation Quality of Medicines (FFQM), together with the German Pharmaceutical Society (DPhG), have honored Dr. Tim Menzen with the DPhG “Quality of Medicines Award” 2024. As the initiator and sponsor of this award, the FFQM congratulates Dr. Menzen and his team for this recognition of their scientific research projects in the development of optimum formulations for biotechnological medicinal products and the establishment of appropriate quality control procedures for such preparations.
Dr. Menzen is pharmacist and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Coriolis Pharma Research GmbH, Martinsried, and in this role his responsibilities include the planning and implementation of internal research projects as well as collaborations with external partners from academia and industry.
The biopharmaceutical medicines that the prizewinner and his team develop are diverse. These include monoclonal antibodies and nucleic acids, for which viral vectors or lipid nanoparticles are used. Cell therapeutics, such as CAR T-cells, and their quality assurance are particularly challenging, especially as these living systems are in a permanent process of change. All these products are characterized by their intrinsic complexity, which results in numerous biophysical and chemical instabilities and degradation pathways. These problems are a significant challenge for the development of biopharmaceutical products with high quality standards.
Accordingly, Tim Menzen’s research activities also focus on the analytical characterization of biopharmaceutical drug products, essential questions related to the stabilization of proteins and viral vectors, computer-assisted (in silico) methods for stability testing and the use of artificial intelligence.
The results of the research activities of Tim Menzen and his team are very impressive. Numerous newly developed and further optimized analytical methods using state-of-the-art technologies are evidence of this, as the list of submitted publications shows.
“Only comprehensive analytical characterization and state-of-the-art technologies make it possible to address the numerous instability possibilities and analytical challenges and thus develop and produce safe, high-quality medicinal products. This motivates me together with my colleagues” said Dr. Menzen at the award ceremony, “to develop new methods, investigate new technologies and solve stability problems of today’s and tomorrow’s drug products in order to provide patients with urgently needed medicines.”
When presenting the award certificate to the awardee, the Chairman of the Foundation, Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Henning Blume, expressed his delight that this year an application from industry is being honored for the first time, and moreover, a particularly complex and challenging topic in the field of quality assurance of medicinal products. In view of the pleasingly large number of applications in 2024, it is to be hoped that the DPhG “Quality of Medicines Award” will once again give this topic the greater attention it deserves.
