Medpace Brand Guidelines: A Cincinnati CRO Founded in 1992 & Listed on Nasdaq in 2016

A former FDA reviewer’s Cincinnati start.

Medpace began in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1992. English Wikipedia says August Troendle founded it that year as Medical Research Services, after starting his career as a reviewer at the US Food and Drug Administration, where he specialised in lipid-lowering therapies for high cholesterol. REDI Cincinnati, the region’s economic-development agency, gave the same founder and year in a June 2016 profile, and said the company’s model differed from other contract research organisations because it could both design and conduct clinical trials, with its own experts guiding each stage of a programme.

A contract research organisation, or CRO, runs clinical studies on behalf of the companies that develop medicines and medical devices. Medpace’s early work, English Wikipedia says, leaned towards cardiology and metabolism: physicians at the company and at Medpace Reference Laboratories ran many early studies of statin therapies, and later work covered diabetes and obesity. The company’s careers blog, in April 2025, describes the founders as “a group of passionate physicians, clinicians, and researchers” who, put simply, wanted to make clinical trials better.

The firm grew abroad through a run of small acquisitions listed by English Wikipedia: Monax, a contract research organisation in the Czech Republic, in 2007; PharmaBrains of Switzerland in 2009; the Minneapolis medical-device consultancy Symbios and Germany’s Medical Consulting Dr. Schlichtiger in 2010; and MediTech, a Dutch device consultancy, in 2012. The encyclopedia adds that the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce honoured Troendle in 2012 for his work as the company’s founder.

A physician-led, full-service model.

Medpace calls itself a full-service CRO: “scientifically-driven,” in its own words, and providing Phase I–IV clinical development to biotech, pharmaceutical and medical-device companies. English Wikipedia lists the services as development-plan and protocol design, project management, regulatory affairs, clinical monitoring, data management and analysis, and post-marketing support, across North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific. Alongside trial management the company runs its own central laboratory, a bioanalytical laboratory, imaging and ECG core laboratories, and a Phase I unit on its Cincinnati campus.

Its website groups the work by therapeutic area, from cardiovascular, endocrine and metabolic studies to oncology, neuroscience and rare diseases, and by what it calls “crossovers,” such as cell and gene therapy, radiopharmaceuticals and paediatrics. Two registered taglines carry the brand’s voice: “Trusted by Biotech” and “Making the Complex Seamless.” The company says it was named the CRO recipient of the 2025 Eagle Award from the Society for Clinical Research Sites.

The headquarters is a campus in Madisonville, on Cincinnati’s east side. English Wikipedia says it was completed in 2012 on a brownfield site formerly occupied by NuTone, and was built to LEED standards. In April 2025 the company’s careers blog described a new phase of building that broke ground in 2024: a 75,000-square-foot Building 600 to house a new Clinical Pharmacology Unit, a nine-story office tower slated to open in mid-2027, and a parking garage, together with a commitment to add 1,500 jobs in the city.

The laboratories are presented almost as a second brand. The website calls its central and bioanalytical laboratories “comprehensive and fully-integrated,” lists bioanalytical work running from preclinical and pharmacokinetic studies to anti-drug-antibody assays, and describes its core labs as offering cardiac safety and imaging services, with imaging specialities from oncology and neurology to nuclear medicine. The company’s blog has announced an expansion of microbiology testing at the central laboratories in Cincinnati, and the corporate website runs separate editions for Japan, South Korea and China.

Design and documentation.

Contract research organisations sell a service rather than a product. Drug, biotechnology and medical-device companies hire them to plan and run clinical trials, to test compounds before they reach people, to manage laboratories and to collect and analyse the data that regulators review. Because what they sell is largely invisible, their public image is built from people, places and numbers.

The pictures tend to repeat. Corporate sites and annual reports in the category often show clinicians and patients of different ages and backgrounds talking in calm, well-lit consulting rooms; scientists in lab coats working with pipettes and sample plates; and world maps dotted with the countries and sites where studies run. Data dashboards, charts and screens are common too, reflecting how much of the work is now about managing information as well as patients.

Colour follows the same caution. Blues and greens, from deep navy to soft teal, are frequent choices in health care and research branding, usually set against plenty of white, with a clean sans for names and headings. The aim is to look steady and trustworthy rather than playful, and names are often short, sometimes initials or a single coined word, partly because many of these companies are the product of mergers.

The industry also meets in person. Large gatherings such as the DIA Global Annual Meeting and the SCOPE Summit for clinical-operations staff bring sponsors, research organisations and technology suppliers together, and exhibition stands, panels and presentation slides there are another place where these identities are on show. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company’s history and ownership, and treats every colour and typeface here as our own interpretation.

Private equity, then the Nasdaq.

Outside investors arrived in the 2010s. English Wikipedia says the private-equity firm CCMP Capital acquired 80 percent of the company in 2011 and sold that stake at auction in February 2014 to Cinven, the European buyout firm. The holding company, Medpace Holdings, Inc., then went public. A company filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission dated 3 November 2016 records its August 2016 initial public offering of 8,050,000 shares and its listing on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol MEDP.

That filing described a Cincinnati-headquartered company of about 2,500 people working in 35 countries. By April 2025 the company’s careers blog put the figure at nearly 6,000 employees across 44 countries, and English Wikipedia now gives about 6,500. The company says it is selective about the projects it takes on, and presents its teams as “an extension” of a sponsor’s own; those are its descriptions of its approach rather than independent findings.

The brand’s public face is restrained. Its website pairs the two short taglines with long lists of therapeutic areas, laboratory methods and imaging specialities, and gives its laboratories, core labs and Phase I unit their own sections, so that the science sits as close to the front as the trial services do.

For a design guide, Medpace shows how a contract research organisation can build a brand around a single home campus, its own laboratories and two short registered taglines. Compare IQVIA and ICON, two other full-service contract research organisations in this series. For this guide we use a deep navy, a teal and a cool grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Medpace’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.