Science and Savvy; Sweden: A culture of innovation breeds biotech start-ups.

Byline: Stryker McGguire

As an immunologist, Hans Wigzell speaks the language of antibody synthesis and transplantation immunity. So what's he doing in his professorially cluttered Stockholm office talking about precommercial interfaces and chain capital? Like more than a few Swedish scientists, he's speaking the money-spinning language of biotechnology research and development. From 1995 to 2003 Wigzell was president of the esteemed Karolinska Institute, whose faculty has chosen Nobel Prize winners in medicine since 1901. Today he is deputy chairman of the university's Karolinska Investment Fund. Hence the new lingo. "There's absolutely no reason for an academic institution to ignore the D in R&D," he says. "Indeed, it would be unethical for us not to assist in getting products to the market." Little wonder that on its Web site the Karolinska Institute's motto is not of the "Lux et veritas" variety. It reads: we spin off a new company nearly every month.

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 ...