Petrone Innovation Challenges: Pharmaceutical Distribution And More

Petrone Group is a privately-owned family company operating in the pharmaceutical, parapharmaceutical and health sector since 1965, with the main offices in Italy and branches in Germany, UK, Ireland, USA, Singapore, Spain France and Portugal.

The Group handles the distribution of all types of pharmaceutical and nutraceutical products world-wide. Rooted in the past, Petrone Group is a family business under third generation management. The company provides a wide range of services that cover the entire product lifecycle: from clinical trials to early access and logistics.

Thanks to Euromed Pharma, the Group ensures an efficient and timely distribution of innovative hospital line products, authorized orphan drugs and unlicensed products on “order to cash” basis all over Europe in order to facilitate patients’ access to innovative drug treatments as early as possible. The business model, along with dedicated customer care support, helps relieve clients from the burden of handling and processing orders, authorizations, payments, credits and any financial transactions. The company offers customized and full-integrated logistics services also for the management of “restricted and controlled” drugs and narcotics.

The Group is a full-service provider to any pharmaceutical company bridging into Europe. In addition, it handles import, export and EAP distribution of all types of pharmaceutical and nutraceutical products and acts a one-stop shop that can supply brand name drugs (branded) or their equivalents (generic), for human use or veterinarians.

Among the Group’s customers there are hospitals, clinics, local health care centers and public and private agencies. Petrone Group is active as a comparator sourcer to Clinical Research Organization for clinical analyses, research projects and scientific tests as well as support services to pharmaceutical companies in Investigational products logistics management activities prior to the launch of new products. Euromed Pharma will provide full services for the distribution of hospital-line products with a particular focus on orphan drugs for rare diseases. Visit www.euromed-pharma.com for further details.

Visit www.petrone.it for more information about Petrone Group.

Innovation at Petrone

Petrone Group has accumulated deep expertise and interest in catalysing investment projects of highly innovative companies, keeping it synergic to the Group’s core business with the aim of bringing mutual benefit and industrial growth. Petrone Group has acted as an investor in various innovative companies.

Open Call For Start-ups

Petrone is very interested to meet start-ups matching the Group’s core business activities as well as adjacent digital health areas. Petrone Group highlights the following business areas:

• Telemedicine & Telepharmacy: Petrone is providing commercial and trading services of pharmaceuticals, para- pharmaceuticals, medical devices, medical equipment, veterinary products, cosmetics worldwide. 
• Pharmacy Distribution, including pharmacies logistics, delivery and services: Petrone is offering a full range of services to manage logistics and active distribution of IMP, RX, H and OTC drugs over Europe, with tailor- made services and multi-channel approach all over the supply chain.
• Anaesthesia oral care drugs: Petrone Group is the main shareholder of an FDA/EMA approved cartridge production plant for dental anesthesia products, Pierrel. Pierrel, is among global suppliers of dental anesthetics, under its proprietary brand Orabloc® or distributor-branded products. It specializes in proprietary, fully developed in-house products with solid brand recognition in addition to a highly reliable quality Contract Manufacturing activity.
• Rare Diseases: Euromed Pharma provides support for the distribution of hospital-line products with a particular focus on orphan drugs for rare diseases. Euromed Pharma specifically provides comprehensive support to MAHs based on an order-to-cash 4PL flow that includes logistic services and the management of tendering activities and the full process of order management, invoicing, and credit collection.
• Other areas include off-the-shelf diagnostic devices, rehabilitation and other related digital health areas, with a particular focus on AI technology application into the healthcare sector. More specifically, AI applications might include systems that support clinicians in the diagnosis and clinical decisions processes, medical Imaging analysis, and also synthetic clinical data generation.

Selection Criteria

Initial market traction is preferred.

What’s in there for selected start-ups?

During the course of the acceleration program, Petrone is considering running a pilot with the aim to launch an MVP (minimum viable product). Petrone Group has a potential interest to evaluate cooperation opportunities with start-ups willing to enter the pharmaceutical distribution arena, or setting up projects that the Group might support as industrial investor.