QIAGEN was founded by a team of scientists from Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1984. Within two years they launched a new method of obtaining genetic material from cells for further analysis that was much easier to use, faster and more reliable than previous methods. This ready-to-use kit reduced processing time from several days to a few hours. This enabled molecular biology processes to be conducted in laboratories all over the world, and not just in universities. Since then, QIAGEN has never stopped growing through the development of new sample and assay technologies.