Switzerland - outward looking

The Swiss biotech industry is following the country's pharma sector as one of Europe's top industries. Its innovative r&d makes its a force for the future

Switzerland has been a major force in the development of new medicines for more than a century, and currently around 5% of global pharmaceutical r&d is attributable to companies from that country.Switzerland's success has been due to its well-established pharmaceutical industry, and this innovative capacity is now being supplemented by a burgeoning biotech sector.

In a recently published report by Ernst & Young the Swiss biotech industry was ranked as one of the top in Europe in terms of product development, turnover and market capitalisation. This success, it says, can largely be attributed to biotech clusters developed around Basel, Geneva and Zurich.

The Zurich MedNet consists of more than 400 companies, universities, institutes, foundations, hospitals and laboratories, making it the single largest medical/biotech cluster in Europe.

Recently, Zurich MedNet formed an alliance with the University of Minnesota's MBBNet. This alliance represents, says author Ciara Howie, 'the world's first and largest medical/bio cluster/web portal alliance, linking research and information resources for more than 1,300 organizations.'

The report says that using a successful clustering strategy the Swiss biotech industry is making the right moves and may prove to some of the larger biotech countries (Germany, UK, Sweden) that Switzerland is Europe's 'sleeping giant.'

The Swiss biotech industry is highly diversified, with around 36% involved in drug discovery, therapeutics and diagnostics. In the past five years some 50 start-up companies have been created in fields such as functional genomics, proteomics and bioinformatics. The Swiss economy minister, Pascal Couchepin, said: 'Biotechnology is one of the most promising sectors for the future of the Swiss economy. In addition to the knowledge gained through research, the biotechnology sector will also be a provider of high value-added products as well as new jobs.'

key indicators

The founder and current president of the Association of Swiss Biotechnology Companies (ASBC), Roland Buehlmann, commented: 'Switzerland provides an ideal environment that brings creative biotech companies a wealth of benefits, including EU-adapted processes, co-operative authorities, highly educated multilingual personnel, research oriented universities, and a positive financial background.'

As the Swiss pharmaceutical market is relatively small, figure 1, companies have concentrated heavily on foreign markets. According to figures from EFPIA, Switzerland's export of pharmaceutical products for 2001 were €18.3m, while imports were half that at €9.1m. A comparison with other European countries, figure 2, shows that the country is the highest exporter of pharmaceutical products in Europe, ahead of Germany, the UK and France.

A report from CRO Chiltern International says that the ability to innovate is a key indicator of the performance of the pharmaceutical industry, figure 3. It says that the innovative capacity of the Swiss companies is aided by the high concentration of technology-based companies centred in Switzerland - the ASBC points out that 20 of Switzerland's 26 cantons have biotech and pharma companies within them.

The Basel area is home to 78 firms, based around the multinationals Novartis, Roche and Syngenta: in the Zurich region, there are 65 companies where academia provides the main thrust, while along the lakeshore from Geneva to Lausanne, a young bio-industry has grown from the close collaboration of universities and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.