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Cold storage is a hot prospect

DARMSTADT, Germany — Four years after its Indianapolis founding, BioStorage Technologies has opened its first European office, raised $8.3 million among investors and aims to reach $30 million in annual sales by 2012.

“We’ve been doing pretty good for a little startup company,” said founder Oscar Moralez as he showed off the bare new German facility he has been busy developing this spring.

Setting up shop in Germany is a small example of a life-sciences economy taking off. Only BioStorage has no drug patents or medical specialty like gene splicing.

It’s a 25-employee, cold storage logistics firm.

One million human blood, bone, serum and tissue samples are stored in its 350 Sanyo industrial freezers in Indianapolis on behalf of 45 clients, chiefly laboratories throughout the United States conducting clinical trials and research on potential new medicines.

Most new companies take years to develop an international presence. BioStorage’s quick rise, though, points to growth from an unexpected side of the life-sciences economy: services.

”You will see faster growth of these service companies for a very basic reason,” said David Johnson, the Indianapolis lawyer who heads BioCrossroads, the region’s life-sciences economic initiative. “They aren’t producing a drug or diagnostic device that has to be placed inside people.”

Service companies don’t conduct years of expensive tests to obtain, as drug makers must, U.S. Food and Drug Administration permission to put their products up for sale.

BioStorage maintains U.S. Food an       _