There are many success stories. Orexigen Therapeutics, for example, offers a weight-loss drug called Contrave for diabetic and obese patients. MolecularMD commercialized the university’s patents on methods for detecting cancer mutations that are resistant to Gleevec, a drug for treating chronic leukemia. Another start-up is testing Richard Wampler’s design for the first non-pumping heart, which could help overcome the shortage of donated hearts.28
The key to all this activity is brainsharing among entities and disciplines. Joe Gray told us that when he was in school, there was no life-sciences curriculum that embraced all the related disciplines. “We know now that you need interdisciplinary collaboration,” he said, “because a single human mind simply can’t grasp the complexities anymore.”
Brainsharing Requires Infrastructure, Too
Start-ups need more than just brilliant scientific minds. Indeed, young companies need market knowledge, infrastructure, and the capital to create it. In this regard, large-scale philanthropy (with Phil Knight as the leader) has played a significant role in providing the needed funds to develop Portland’s biomedical infrastructure. In addition to Knight’s contributions, gifts made by Daniel K. Ludwig, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and others29 have helped create facilities that encourage the sharing of brainpower. The new buildings of the Knight Cancer Institute, for example, will be located close to the downtown area, rather than on a campus hilltop outside the center. The effect will be to link OHSU’s cancer research activities into the ecosystem of start-ups and bioscience incubators and enable connections with chemistry and engineering at other universities nearby.
OHSU’s Collaborative Life Sciences Building, too, will be an important component of the university’s downtown presence and a hub of its collaboration with Intel. There, engineering and computer science are integrated into the curriculum, and the building is designed with features that accommodate the most advanced health-care-related equipment. The floors, for example, “float” within the superstructure so as to eliminate environmental vibration, which can disturb the operation of extremely sensitive microscopes. Most important, OHSU’s star researchers, including Joe Gray, have offices at the facility. Gray showed us a photo of the view from his office just a few years ago, which looked out on the Willamette River and the remains of the shipyard that operated there for decades.
That view has been transformed. According to angel investor Eric Rosenfeld, Portland was once characterized as a “smaller version of Cincinnati,” meaning that it was bland and without the amenities that are necessary to creating brainbelts. No longer. City officials and university administrators are working together to revive abandoned parts of the city, improve transportation, and promote opportunities for young entrepreneurs to open farmers’ markets with locally produced food and to create good restaurants. Portland already has the most bike riders per capita of any American city and is a magnet for well-educated graduates who like working in start-ups. “This is a fun place for creative geeks,” Rosenfeld says. “and we also attract affluent, retired CEOs who love to take on a new management challenges.”30
Portland waterfront, 1898.
Credit: Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-120205
Portland has been known for years as a hotspot for athletic pursuits, sportswear, specialty beer brewing, and wine making. Now it is gaining worldwide attention as a hotspot of brainsharing activity in life sciences.
Portland streetcar in front of OHSU Life Sciences Building.
Credit: Teresa Boyle, City of Portland/NACTO
Zurich: A New Kind of Currency
Fred’s first trip outside Holland as a financial journalist, in the spring of 1981, was to Switzerland. There, as he interviewed bankers and financial analysts, he saw that confidential banking was a sacred asset. Thirty years later, under heavy pressure from American authorities, Swiss banks were forced to change their private banking practices and lost some of that traditional advantage. The 2008 financial crisis dealt another painful blow to the local banking community.
Therefore, when we visited Zurich in 2014, our purpose was not to interview members of the financial industry but rather to learn more about the Technical University that had become a start-up engine of biotech firms. Traditionally, fundamental research had been done by the global pharmaceutical companies, such as Roche and Novartis in nearby Basel, but in the previous two decades Zurich developed as a life-science brainbelt. Just as we saw in other cities, Zurich’s abandoned manufacturing sites now were home to a science park, theaters, and restaurants. These long-forgotten areas had become vibrant and attractive places to live and work.
View from Peter Church, Zurich, Switzerland.
Credit: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Photochrom Collection LC-DIG-ppmsc-07927
Zurich, and the other life-sciences brainbelts we investigated in Europe—Dresden and Oulu—developed in ways quite distinct from the life-sciences brainbelts in the United States and the brainsharing centers that had focused on different industries. Although Zurich did not go through a rustbelt phase or face an existential crisis, it did lose some of its traditional manufacturing industries and the banking industry lost some of its dominance, but it was still a banking center and was also headquarters to luxury businesses with world-class brand names like Rolex and Lindt.
Mario Jenni, center, with Gian-Luca Bona (CEO of Empa), left, and Peter Frischknecht (managing director of Feld3), right.
Credit: © Empa, 2013
The emergence of Zurich as a life-sciences brainbelt was largely due to the initiatives of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), based in Zurich. ETH Zurich is one of the world’s leading universities for technology and the natural sciences, a magnet for talented individuals, a hotbed of start-up activity, and a desirable location for established organizations as well. As we learned in other brainbelts, the genesis of the change could be traced to an individual connector and, in this case, it was Charles Weissmann, founder of Biogen, as we saw in Chapter 1. Weissmann’s name came up immediately when we spoke with Mario Jenni, part-time CEO of the Bio-Technopark Schlieren- Zurich, where much of the regional action in life-sciences research takes place. As director of the Molecular Biology Institute at ETH, Weissmann had been an academic who had turned entrepreneur to found Biogen in 1978. His colleagues thought Weissmann had “sold his soul to the devil,” Jenni told us.31
However, as typically happens in the development of a brainbelt, Weissmann’s bold move eventually brought people of differing opinions together. Although universities do not change quickly, over the period of a decade Biogen’s success caused other academic researchers and administrators to reexamine their attitudes about the relationship between research and business. Their conversion was hastened with the passage in 1991 of legislation that required ETH, a state-funded institution, to apply its research to the creation of products that would benefit the taxpayers who funded the research and the society as a whole. Gradually, ETH took on the institutional connector role that Weissmann had pioneered and became like a benign spider in the web, the essential player in an ecosystem that includes the usual suspects: academics, authorities, entrepreneurs, scientists, and financiers.
Just as important as the role of the university was the establishment of several science parks. The first was Technopark Zurich, which opened its doors in 1993. It was developed by Thomas von Waldkirch, long a professor at ETH and one of the few academics who applauded the founding of Biogen by his colleague, Professor Weissmann. Von Waldkirch had visited the United States in 1985, and what he experienced there convinced him that Zurich needed a science park where young entrepreneurs could be mentored and flourish. He began by establishing the Technopark Foundation in 1988, with support from Zurich mayor Thomas Wagner and ETH president Heinrich Ursprung, as well as entrepreneurs, politicians, researchers, and bankers.32 The venture found a home in a manufacturing facility vacated by the Swiss industrial group Sulzer, and as soon as the renovations were completed, companies began
moving in. In 2001, von Waldkirch was ready to take on a different challenge. As his successor, he selected Lesley Spiegel, then thirty-one, because she was a contemporary of the entrepreneurs in the facility. During Spiegel’s tenure as leader of the Technopark Zurich, the number of company tenants has doubled to over three hundred, primarily in science and technology but also in financial services.
The Bio-Technopark Schlieren-Zurich, which is devoted solely to life-sciences companies, was the brainchild of Leo Krummenacher, a retired entrepreneur. He purchased several buildings from the Swiss Rail Carriage and Elevator Factory when it went out of business in 1984. He knew the university, ETH, was desperately in need of space at the time and it was one of the first tenants to move in, but it soon moved to a brand-new complex north of the city. Krummenacher kept in touch with some of the professors he had gotten to know during ETH’s brief tenancy, and they told him that what was really needed was an incubator that could provide specialized laboratory equipment that many start-ups did not have access to or could not afford. Krummenacher did some calculations. “I felt the risks were limited,” he said, “so I stepped in.”33 The incubator proved immediately attractive, and since then, tens of millions of Swiss francs have been invested in equipment.34
Mario Jenni has been part-time CEO of the Bio-Technopark Schlieren-Zurich since 2003. Perhaps his most important duty is identifying and accepting tenants for the park. “The selection of companies remains very focused on life sciences and we cannot dilute that,” Jenni has said. More than thirty companies are now based in the park, including producers of drugs, medical devices, biodegradable bones, and diagnostics. Ninety percent of the companies that started up there have survived.
Because land is limited, the park is building upward into high-rises. Jenni wants to add more offices and laboratory space as well as features that will enhance the campus-like atmosphere, with informal meeting areas where people can interact informally and an auditorium for large meetings, lectures, and conferences.
One of the success stories at Bio-Technopark is the start-up company Molecular Partners, which develops proteins whose purpose is to guide medications to locations in the body where they can do their work most effectively.35 The company has research agreements with several pharmaceutical companies, valued at about $50 million each. In 2012, Molecular Partners formed an alliance with Allergan, based in the United States, to develop more effective treatments for diseases of the eye, a research collaboration that could be worth as much as $1.4 billion in revenues to the company.
But Bio-Technopark is not solely a haven for start-ups and university-led initiatives. In 2005, the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche bought Glycart, whose mission is “to become a world leader in the development of antibody products that address unmet clinical needs with increased efficacy.”36 That research will be concentrated at the Bio-Technopark. Novartis made its debut at the park in 2009 with the purchase of ESBATech, which plays an important role in preclinical research on a wide range of eye diseases.37
The explosion in research, start-ups, and big-company facilities has created a need to do just as they’re doing in Portland: develop ways to bring academia and industry closer together to better exchange information and collaborate on initiatives that build the ecosystem. To that end, ETH created the Technology Transfer Department to support students and professors in developing commercial projects. The university also launched a trial incubator in 2012, called the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Lab (ieLab), whose purpose is to help students learn entrepreneurship by translating their ideas for products into business models. One of the focus areas of the ieLab is life sciences: molecular biology, biotechnology, biochemistry, pharmaceuticals, and diagnostics. Undergraduates with an idea can apply for an eighteen-month stint at the ieLab. Those who are accepted receive seed capital of 150,000 CHF (about $160,000), free room and board, and access to advice and mentorship from a variety of experts on such matters as law, patents, finance, and entrepreneurship.
In Zurich, though the promoters, most of whom were professors of biology, saw the need for multidisciplinary collaboration, it was still difficult to lure the academics and researchers out of their silos. In Portland, Joe Gray faced the same problem, and his solution was to create the new buildings on the river’s edge to make it virtually impossible for its inhabitants not to collaborate. The installation of a state-of-the-art multidisciplinary laboratory—featuring the latest FEI microscopes—sealed the deal and removed any lingering reservations that some still might have had. The ETH employed the same tactic. In 2006, the Swiss government donated 100 million CHF ($107 million) to open a new university site in Basel. That same year, the president of the university, Ernst Hafen, a molecular biologist, created a multidisciplinary institute, the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, where biologists, physicists, chemists, and computer scientists now work closely together on big-data research.38
Unlike some of the former rustbelt cities, the Zurich brainbelt does not need much in the way of improvements to the city environment. Professionals in their thirties and forties, both Swiss and foreign, love to work in the area. “Let’s be honest,” said Mario Jenni, “Switzerland is a great place to live.”
BioSaxony: State Support Stimulates Private Action
Saxony, the former East German state with its capital city, Dresden, suffered deeply from the Communist period that lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Free enterprise and private ownership had not been allowed under the Communist regime, and this meant that the market economy had to be built up from scratch. It was an experienced politician, Kurt Biedenkopf, prime minister from 1990 to 2002, who focused this process on fundamental research.
Saxony had a rich history in this regard, and Biedenkopf wanted to build a new economic order on this tradition. It was a smart and successful bet. Dresden is now home to the largest chip-production sites in Europe, as we saw in Chapter 2. But what is less well known—we only learned about it on our first visit—is that Dresden and nearby Leipzig also developed a brainbelt in the life-science field.
Dresden is working hard to bring this “sleeping beauty” to life. The man who is leading the charge is André Hofmann, an energetic engineer in his mid-thirties who is CEO of BioSaxony, an association founded in 2009 to boost the life-sciences sector.39 When we met, it was a surprise, if not a shock, to see such a young man in the role of connector. Other connectors we had met were typically businesspeople, administrators, politicians, or scientists with many years of practical experience and large networks of colleagues and associates.
But Hofmann has a personal quality that is a great asset for any connector—empathy, a quality that is needed to bring people, companies and institutions together and to unite often opposing or conflicting views and interests into a new, inspiring identity. He showed this aspect of his personality when we asked him about his experiences with the two political systems—Communist and capitalist—he had lived in. Hofmann was in elementary school when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and he praised the way that kids helped each other during the Communist era. That group cohesion has been eroded by competitiveness and a greater focus on individualism. Yet life was far from rosy in the Communist era. Hofmann remembers how his older brother was not allowed to attend college, because their father was not a member of the Communist Party. By the time Hofmann was ready for college, seven years later, he had freedom of choice.
The buildup of the life-sciences brainbelt in Dresden has similarities to that of Portland. In Oregon, it was Phil Knight’s philanthropy that catalyzed the creation of new infrastructural elements such as research facilities and helped attract more scientists. In Dresden, a €100 million investment made by the state had a similar effect.
In the late 1990s, scientists and entrepreneurs in Saxony saw there were tremendous business opportunities in life sciences, and in 2000, the state government provided €200 million to set up the necessary facilities and attract top-notch life-sciences researchers.
The funds were to be equally divided between the cities of Leipzig, in western Saxony, and Dresden, in the center of the state.
The stimulus had dramatic results in both cities. In Leipzig, an incubator was opened in 2003, called Bio City Leipzig,40 which soon became home to forty start-ups, biotech service companies, and six professors who conducted research in the incubator’s labs, and the start-ups are further supported by a technology transfer organization called Bio-Net Leipzig.41 Seeing the success of the incubator, the city of Leipzig, in conjunction with the state, provided an additional €200 million in support of life-sciences activities.
The most exciting initiative came in 2005, when the medical school at the University of Leipzig launched an initiative called Innovation Center Computer Assisted Surgery (ICCAS).42 Its mission is to bring together scientists from several disciplines—including engineering, material sciences, and medical sciences—to conduct research toward a common goal: developing the operating room of the future. ICCAS has become the leading authority in model-based automation and integration (MAI), an initiative to “integrate standardized patient and process models and to make them available to surgeons before and during operations,” for standardization of surgical methods and the development of patient and process models in oncology.43
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