As life sciences laboratories embrace automation, digitalisation, and increasingly complex research workflows, technology providers are being challenged to deliver solutions that combine performance, sustainability, and ease of use. In this exclusive conversation with BioSpectrum Asia, Dr. Marlene Jentzsch, Senior Vice President, Core Business Portfolio at Eppendorf, shares how the company is reshaping its product strategy, investing in future-ready laboratory technologies, and supporting scientists across academia and industry with solutions designed to accelerate discovery and improve reproducibility.
Since taking responsibility for nearly the entire Eppendorf Core Business Portfolio, what strategic priorities have guided your approach to portfolio consolidation, and what opportunities do you see emerging from this transformation?
The primary focus has been to shape our portfolio in a way that introduces solution concepts that truly accelerate, simplify, and make science more reproducible. At Eppendorf, we see ourselves first and foremost as a strong solution-provider for concrete laboratory applications. That means any innovation we bring to market must be clearly aligned with the real needs of our customers in their daily workflows.
Portfolio consolidation plays an important role in achieving this. By concentrating on our winning products, we can continuously improve them and ensure that we are offering the best possible solutions to our customers. A more focused portfolio also makes it easier for customers to find the right product for their specific application, while at the same time enabling us to streamline and simplify our internal workflows and processes.
Reliability and robustness are non-negotiable elements of our strategy and of highest importance. It is essential for us to provide high-quality solutions today and in the future, so every portfolio decision comes with a strong emphasis on long-term performance. We increasingly build platform concepts with very similar user interfaces across devices, so that customers can switch between products with minimal training effort. Equally, sustainability is a core strategic pillar for both consumables and instruments. A good example is our BioBased consumables portfolio, which includes Eppendorf Tubes®, Safe-Lock® Tubes (“Eppis®”), epT.I.P.S.® pipette tips, Deepwell plates and twin.tec® Trace PCR plates in BioBased versions. On the instrument side, we are driving sustainability by switching to refrigerants with substantially lower climate impact in our cooling technologies.
All of this is developed in very close cooperation with our customers. We conduct extensive customer surveys across different application areas and solution options to ensure that the ongoing portfolio transformation genuinely reflects real needs.
As a member of Eppendorf’s Group Executive Committee, how do you balance long-term innovation investments with the immediate needs of laboratories, biopharma manufacturers, and research institutions worldwide?
Balancing long-term innovation with the immediate needs of laboratories, biopharma manufacturers, and research institutions is a crucial priority for us. We invest significantly in understanding how laboratories of the future will look and what role Eppendorf can and should play in that environment.
Organizationally, we explicitly differentiate between teams that focus on short-term solution offerings and improvements to our existing portfolio, and teams that work on future opportunity fields that will become relevant over a longer time horizon. This setup allows us to address urgent customer needs, while still pushing transformative innovation.
Our governance processes reflect this dual focus. On the one hand, we look at current operational performance; on the other, we track our longer-term innovation initiatives, making sure that the right topics are defined and that we progress against clearly defined milestones.
This balance is also visible in our planning processes. We allocate dedicated development budgets for longer-term innovation topics, separate from the budgets for near-term product enhancements. In doing so, we ensure that immediate improvements and future breakthroughs are both systematically supported.
The life sciences sector is evolving rapidly through automation, digitalization, and changing research workflows. How is Eppendorf adapting its portfolio strategy to support these shifts?
We already see the rapid evolution of the life sciences sector very clearly – through automation, digitalization, and increasingly also the use of AI. In several product groups, we observe a strong move toward automated workflows in the lab, and we are adapting our portfolio strategy so that our future solutions can communicate effectively with automated systems.
Seamless data exchange will be even more critical in the future. For that reason, all new devices are designed with connectivity and data transfer capabilities in mind. For our consumables, we offer barcoded solutions so that they can be optimally integrated into automated and digital workflows and easily tracked and documented.
Our instruments can be connected to Eppendorf’s digital cloud platform VisioNize. This enables remote device monitoring, immediate alarm notifications via email and app, device documentation, remote updates, audit trails, and extended data access.
We are also very aware of trends such as “dark labs” and “closed loop labs,” and we closely monitor these developments. We assess what they could mean for Eppendorf and how our portfolio might best support such highly automated, data-driven environments in the future.
At the same time, it is important for us not to lose sight of today’s reality in many laboratories. We continue to focus on serving our customers’ current applications and ways of working in an optimal way, so that today’s labs benefit directly from our portfolio strategy.
Eppendorf recently introduced the Eppendorf Research® 3 neo pipette and SpinPro® 6 R centrifuge. What unmet customer needs influenced the development of these products, and how do they reflect Eppendorf’s broader innovation roadmap?
In developing the Eppendorf Research® 3 neo pipette and the SpinPro® 6 R centrifuge, it was essential for us to work very closely with customers. We wanted to deeply understand their pain points and translate those insights into concrete solution concepts. For new products, we place strong emphasis on intuitive operation and reliable performance, so that customers can concentrate on their research rather than on the equipment itself.
SpinPro® 6 R is the first in a new generation of Eppendorf centrifuges, setting a strong foundation for our future portfolio. With SpinPro® 6 R, our goal was to significantly increase flexibility while modernizing design and day-to-day handling. The system supports a broad range of applications through a comprehensive portfolio of state-of-the-art rotors for multiple vessel types.
At the same time, customers made it clear they wanted safer, more intuitive operation. In response, SpinPro® 6 R combines an ergonomic user interface, a motorized lid, RFID-based instant rotor recognition, and our Eppendorf QuickLock® Pro lids for fast, one-handed rotor opening and closing, raising both safety and ease of use. We also see a strong and growing demand for more sustainable, high-performance centrifugation. That is why SpinPro® 6 R incorporates environmentally friendly cooling technology with a very low global-warming impact.
For the Eppendorf Research® 3 neo pipette, a major unmet need was to further minimize physical strain associated with intensive daily pipetting. We therefore designed an operating concept that meets very high ergonomic standards and supports comfortable, precise handling over long periods. Combining high precision and accuracy with low operating forces, fast volume adjustment, and customizable settings, the Research 3 neo pipettes are engineered to support reproducible results and user comfort in routine and demanding laboratory applications alike. This approach has also been recognized externally: the Eppendorf Research 3 neo pipettes have just recently received the SelectScience Scientists' Choice Award 2026 in the category "Best New General Lab Product", as voted for by scientists around the world.
Overall, both products reflect our broader innovation roadmap: combining customer-driven ergonomics, sustainability, safety, and connected capabilities to improve laboratory workflows today, while at the same time preparing labs for more automated and data-driven environments tomorrow.
From your perspective, what are the most significant challenges and opportunities currently shaping laboratory technology and scientific workflows across global markets, including Asia Pacific?
We see that geopolitical challenges have intensified over the past few years, and we expect them to continue significantly influencing global markets and scientific ecosystems. In some countries, there is also a stronger focus on local-preference policies. This makes it even more important to have a truly global sourcing and manufacturing footprint, as well as global service capabilities, and to work closely with local partners. For Eppendorf, having a global footprint in both R&D and manufacturing is therefore more important than ever.
We also observe a clear increase in expectations around regulatory compliance and data integrity, driven both by authorities and by our customers’ own internal quality standards. At the same time, sustainability and energy costs are becoming critical decision criteria. Recent years have shown how important it is to reduce energy consumption and the environmental footprint while maintaining high performance in laboratory operations.
Another central theme is speed. Our solutions must help increase the speed of research for our customers. In academia, this means enabling faster publications; in industry, it translates into shortening the time to market for innovations.
Alongside innovative products, high-quality service and support are essential. Customers expect reliable installation, application support, and maintenance so that their labs can deliver consistent performance.
In the Asia-Pacific region, we see strong growth dynamics. This is why local presence is key for us.
Looking ahead, how do you envision Eppendorf's product portfolio evolving over the next three to five years, and which areas of innovation will be most critical to supporting the future of life sciences research and biomanufacturing?
For more than 80 years, Eppendorf has stood for outstanding laboratory products such as pipettes, consumables, centrifuges, and more. We will continue to offer high-quality, high-performance products that our customers can rely on in critical applications.
Historically, Eppendorf introduced key innovations such as the first commercial piston pipette, the microliter system that enabled a shift from larger to microliter volumes, high-performance centrifuges, and the iconic Eppendorf reaction tube (“Eppi®”). Looking ahead, we aim to continue setting standards and creating the next generation of widely adopted laboratory benchmarks.
Biobased solutions will play an increasingly important role in our future portfolio. We are expanding our BioBased offering and will integrate additional BioBased products into our range over time. In parallel, we are consistently converting further products to greener refrigerants with a lower global warming potential and actively exploring new technologies that can make our solutions even more sustainable in the future, so that Eppendorf can contribute to a more sustainable world.
Advancing user experience is another critical focus area. Our goal is for customers to concentrate on their research and on developing their own solutions, while our products remain intuitive to understand and operate, with minimal learning effort.
As a company, rapid and continuous further development is crucial. The life science environment is highly dynamic, and Eppendorf does not only want to participate in this market development, but also to actively help shape it. Overall, we will particularly invest in automation-ready and connected solutions, sustainable product concepts, and advanced ergonomics and user experience to support the future of life sciences research and biomanufacturing.
