10 Years anniversary of Excelsus

"Excelsus Structural Solutions" celebrates its anniversary: the PSI spin-off was founded in March 2012. Today, the company has seven employees and is located both in Villigen at Park Innovaare in the immediate vicinity of PSI and has a further site in Brussels. The company offers its industrial and scientific customers advanced analytical services. Mainly samples from pharmaceuticals, chemistry and food production reach Excelsus. The company's scientific staff conduct their investigations mainly at the Swiss Light Source SLS at PSI using X-ray powder diffraction.

Fabia Gozzo, the spin-offs’ founder and CEO, has previously worked for more than 10 years at PSI as a beamline scientist at the SLS. As a result, she is perfectly positioned for competently carrying out and evaluating investigations for industry at the SLS in a commercial capacity. For example, Excelsus is capable of measuring the smallest deviations in the active ingredient structure in drugs for the pharmaceutical industry, which are hardly detectable with any other method of analysis. In this way, the company provides an important contribution to quality assurance for its customers and to improving the selection, development and production of pharmaceutical products.

"Working at the interface between science and industry is very intriguing," says Fabia Gozzo. "The work we do at Excelsus is close to pure science on the one hand, but with a focus on the understanding and the solution of industrial problems on the other. It is very rewarding to be able to help a company make a leap forward in understanding to help them improve their products." In the last 10 years, Excelsus has already helped more than 35 pharmaceutical and chemical companies, research institutions and even law firms.

Not only does Excelsus offer its customers measurements at the SLS, they often already support them by analyzing the presented issue in advance. "In fact, we rather say that we conduct experiments on behalf of clients rather than simple measurements," says Gozzo, "because each sample comes with its own unique scientific question." After a measurement for a customer, Excelsus also offers to analyze the data and to write a final report. "We bring our scientific expertise to the table, we understand the particular sample and we know what we can do to extract the most information from our state-of-the-art measurements."

With this full service approach and wide service offering, Excelsus complements the existing analytics offered at PSI for industry, including the possibility of research collaboration. Excelsus purchases its required beam time directly from PSI and cooperates closely with the researchers at the SLS beamlines – a win-win situation for both sides.

Excelsus has also achieved success outside of science this year: The spin-off was awarded the "Women Owned Business" certificate by the organisation "WE Connect International". The prerequisite for this award is that a company is at least 51 percent owned, managed and controlled by one or more women.

The 10 years anniversary celebration at Park Innovaare gives its guests an insight into the large-scale research facilities at PSI as well as topic-specific workshops on pharmaceutical applications and methods with presentations of case studies from previous customers. An exclusive "Meet an Excelsus expert" also offers the opportunity to test the analytical services of Excelsus Structural Solutions free of charge.

The celebration is an occasion to look back and also to take a peek into the future: "We are looking forward to another successful ten years - at least!" says Gozzo.

Text: Paul Scherrer Institute/Stefanie Wiedner and Laura Hennemann