Karolinska is just one star in the Swedish biotech constellation. Amid hopes globally that 2004 will mark an upturn for the roller-coastering industry, Sweden has emerged as a leading center of biotech research. Important clusters include the cross-border “Medicon Valley” (the Malmo-Lund region in southern Sweden, and Copenhagen on the Danish side) and Goteborg on the west coast. The country’s richest seedbed is the Stockholm-Uppsala corridor, where more than half its biotech firms are located. Anchored at the Stockholm end by Karolinska and the Royal Institute of Technology, it stretches 70 kilometers north to Uppsala, home to 527-year-old Uppsala University, the oldest in Scandinavia. The result is what Wigzell calls a “rain forest” of biotech start-ups–100 or more firms thriving (or at least surviving) on Sweden’s scientific talent, lavish government incentives and a well-established culture of innovation.
In the United States and some other countries, ethical debates have stifled stem-cell research, which is thriving in Sweden. Indeed, as a marriage of science and technology, biotech plays to Sweden’s strengths. The scientific brainpower is provided by great state universities, which earlier proved essential to the growth of Sweden’s IT and telecommunications sectors. Innovation in the life sciences also benefits from a long, even cozy tradition of collaboration among academia, government and industry. On a per capita basis, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Swedish government is the world’s most generous investor in all kinds of research. In biotechnology specifically, according to a Capgemini Ernst & Young report published in March, Sweden offers the best climate for research and innovation in Europe, as well as the highest-quality work force.
Historically Swedish biotech also got a boost from two other quarters–one serendipitous, the other peculiarly Swedish. The latter has to do with Swedish law, which grants teachers, rather than the universities that employ them, the patent rights to their inventions. This has been a spur to cutting-edge research–and a source of wealth for academicians like Mathias Uhlen, who developed a genotyping method called Pyro-sequencing. What high-octane researchers sometimes lack, however, is business-development skills.
Enter serendipity. The merger in 1995 of the Swedish drug company Pharmacia and America’s Upjohn Co. proved to be a disaster for Uppsala at first. In the aftermath, thousands of Swedes lost their jobs. Many remain unemployed, but many others, on both the research and the development sides of the business, migrated to the fast-growing biotech sector. Mats Pettersson, the CEO of Biovitrum, a big Stockholm biotech company (and himself a onetime Pharmacia executive), estimates that three out of every four CEOs and chief science officers at Swedish biotech start-ups are Pharmacia alumni.
That’s the case at Amic AB, a small Uppsala company founded in 1998. Amic’s diagnostic chips, which can perform multiple diagnostic tests far from hospital labs, should position the company to benefit from the phenomenal growth of the diagnostics industry. CSO Ib Mendel-Hartvig, a Pharmacia alum, is happy to be doing the sort of advanced research that, he says, his old company was “scaling down.” He sighs. At Amic, “the risk is there, but not the money.” Not yet, anyway. Welcome to the rain forest, Ib.
