Incompetent service, wasted samples, yet charging
It is probably unusually to review CRO companies on a consumer web page like this, but I couldn’t find anywhere else to post my review. As a scientist in a large pharmaceutical company, I have been in contact with Evotec a few times and it has not been a good experience. Examples are quotes that are extremely high, as charging weeks for tasks that takes hours, poor judgement from scientist on FTE contracts. In the most recent case a scientist on my project team had outsourced RNA tissue purification and QPCR analysis. However, Evotec fails to purify the RNA. It seems they did not spin out the washing buffer, so 280/260 was through the sky and RNA was lost, couldn’t even recover from the eluate. Nevertheless, they continue and runs all the QPCR downstream. The results were hopeless, many well with no signal, wells with signal had extreme Ct values and technical replicates were far apart. A 100K€ in vivo study and 3 months of work were down the drain. This wasn’t just bad luck, this is incompetent, nevertheless Evotec was not shy of sending an invoice. I think it was around 60 K€. This was escalated with Evotec and all the way up they insisted that we had to pay for their gross mistakes. As this is a ‘small case’, we did not pursue this in the legal system. To me it shows a poor business culture. The consequence, Evotec has lost all current and future contracts with my business area.
11 March 2020
Unprompted review