Company

PeCon was found­ed in 1980 by the two sci­en­tists Dr. Sieg­wald Pentz and Heide Hör­ler. Work­ing togeth­er for many years at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ulm in the Depart­ment of Clin­i­cal Genet­ics, they focused espe­cial­ly on the in vitro cul­ti­va­tion of pri­ma­ry cells, tis­sues and per­ma­nent cell lines.

When they start­ed to work with car­diac mus­cle cells, they had to face var­i­ous prob­lems in the cul­ti­va­tion and behav­iour, espe­cial­ly dur­ing micro­scop­ic obser­va­tion. Incu­bat­ed at ideal envi­ron­men­tal con­di­tions in a stan­dard lab­o­ra­to­ry incu­ba­tor, the cells showed cell divi­sion and dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion towards con­tract­ing cells. But dur­ing micro­scop­ic obser­va­tion, the ampli­tude and fre­quen­cy of the con­trac­tions changed substantially.

It was at this point, when Sieg­wald Pentz and Heide Hör­ler start­ed with the devel­op­ment of units to con­trol the tem­per­a­ture and CO₂ con­cen­tra­tion on the micros­cope. By using these incu­ba­tion sys­tems, they were able to achieve a pro­longed sta­bil­i­ty of the con­trac­tions of the car­diac mus­cle cells dur­ing micro­scop­ic obser­va­tion. The incu­ba­tion sys­tems enabled them to estab­lish an assay for the in vitro detec­tion of the influ­ence of test sub­stances on the con­trac­tion fre­quen­cy and ampli­tude of car­diac mus­cle cells. This turned out to be a valu­able tool to detect poten­tial neg­a­tive effects of newly syn­the­sized chem­i­cal and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pounds on the car­dio­vas­cu­lar system.

Thanks to the excel­lent per­son­al rela­tion­ship with the Carl Zeiss AG, they start­ed a col­lab­o­ra­tion and, over many years of research and coop­er­a­tion, estab­lished and devel­oped a large prod­uct range for dif­fer­ent micro­scop­ic appli­ca­tions and other well-known micros­cope man­u­fac­tur­ers like Leica, Olym­pus and Nikon. PeCon pro­ducts are now avail­able world­wide and are being con­tin­u­ous­ly improved. Our com­pa­ny is cer­ti­fied accord­ing to ISO 9001. Our goal is to con­stant­ly devel­op new ways and tech­niques in order to offer you the best and most con­ve­nient meth­ods for incu­bat­ing cell and tis­sue cul­tures on the microscope.