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.

Setting up shop in Germany is a small example of a life-sciences economy taking off. Only Bio-Storage 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 FDA-level quality standards, which are essential for clinical trials, and sets itself apart with speed. Its software, designed by Information Engineering of Indianapolis, can locate any particular sample in the freezers swiftly by computer, Moralez said.

This allows medical laboratories to request a specific piece of tissue taken from a particular patient years ago and have it shipped immediately by over-night express worldwide in a dry-ice pack. By comparing old and new samples from the same patient, a lab's scientists can measure a medicine's impact.

In Indianapolis, the operation is about the size of a small supermarket, covering 22,000 square feet. Inside are banks of freezers capable of temperatures far below zero. By locating in an airport industrial park near the FedEx freight hub, BioStorage can ship thousands of samples daily.

Moralez is preparing to replicate a smaller version of the Indianapolis service in Darmstadt, a suburb of Frankfurt, next to one of Europe's largest airports. Plans are for it to become a stepping stone to new clients across Europe and eventually Asia.