BioWorld International Correspondent

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Stockholm's city authorities and its three principal universities are cooperating on a master plan to develop a new bioscience hub in the northwestern quarter of the Swedish capital by the end of the decade. The overall aim is to create a new district in the city that would provide both living quarters and facilities for biomedical research and for biotechnology companies.

The site earmarked for the development spans an old railway yard close to Norra Station in the Vasastan district of the city and the E4 highway, one of the country's main north-south arterial routes. "The plan is to overbuild the motorway with a big concrete plate and build a new city section in Stockholm," said Ola Björkman, associate professor at Karolinksa Institute and project director of Stockholm Bioscience, the three-way alliance between Karolinksa, Stockholm University and the Royal Institute of Technology that is brokering their participation in the initiative.

The site, which is adjacent to the main Karolinska Institute campus, has upward of 500,000 square meters of development space, of which between 30 percent and 40 percent would be devoted to residential facilities.

Planning for the initiative is still at a relatively early stage, and it will require substantial levels of investment from the private sector if it is to get off the ground. However, Björkman said it has received political backing. Visiting the recent BioTech Forum in Stockholm, the mayor of the city, Annike Billström, told BioWorld International that bioscience and biomedical research is one of three principal priorities for the city, along with IT and telecoms and architecture and design. "That is the whole vision for five, 10, 15 years further out," she said.

Stockholm Bioscience, which has been operating for the past two years, is itself more focused on content than on real estate development. Its aim is to develop the city's existing strengths in biomedical research by fostering research collaborations among the three institutions, which, in time, are expected to evolve into joint research centers in areas such as neuroscience, cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease, immunology and clinical research. Collaborative efforts in neuroscience, computational biology and microsystems technology are already under way.

The organization's efforts to bolster Stockholm's competitive standing as a bioscience hub come at a time when there is genuine concern among all of the country's research stakeholders that Sweden is slipping down the international rankings in a number of fields. According to a joint report published earlier this year by Vinnova (the Swedish Agency for Innovation Systems) and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, Finland and Israel have now passed Sweden in immunology, when regarding citation levels and corrected for population size. Seven countries have overtaken it in cell and developmental biology since the late 1980s, while in neuroscience, a field in which it once held the No. 1 ranking, it now lags Germany, Canada, the UK, Switzerland and the U.S.

The Swedish Research Council is spearheading a lobbying effort on behalf of the country's science and technology stakeholders, who are calling on the government to increase funding for basic research. The country's biotechnology industry also sees this as the top priority. "The single most important issue is to get money into basic research," said Björn Nilsson, chairman of SwedenBio and president and CEO of Huddinge-based Karo Bio AB, during a panel discussion at the BioTech Forum. (See BioWorld International Nov. 5, 2003.)

But the government's budgetary position is tight as the economy remains sluggish, while the cost of maintaining its traditionally generous social security provisions is high. Unless it publishes a new budgetary framework for research, funding is likely to be pegged to current levels. The timing involved in that process is still uncertain. Some observers had hoped such a document would appear in the spring.

"I am not sure," H kan Carlsson, press secretary for the Ministry of Education and Science, told BioWorld International, "I hope it will be in a year."