Opportunities for Australian biotechs in Switzerland

Campus Biotech, a large-scale facility dedicated to biotechnology research in Geneva, is inviting Australian biotech companies to establish themselves on site in the Swiss Health Valley.

Campus Biotech is the latest development in Western Switzerland’s Health Valley, which concentrates 800 international and Swiss life science companies.

Dedicated to bio- and neuro-engineering, Campus Biotech will be located in the former Merck Serono headquarters which closed down a year ago.

The initiative is being led by Ernesto Bertarelli (the grandson of Serono’s founder) and Hansjürg Wyss (founder of Synthes, which was sold to Johnson & Johnson in 2012 for $21 billion, and of Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering). The two Swiss entrepreneurs formed a consortium with the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), commonly referred to as the ‘Swiss MIT’, and the University of Geneva to establish the site.

The EPFL will receive a donation of CHF 100 million (AU$116 million) to partner with the University of Geneva and create a Geneva Wyss Institute, similar to the Wyss Harvard Institute, at Campus Biotech.

A total of 300 researchers will be working at Campus Biotech and the facility will also be home to international start-ups and more established companies looking for new office spaces or labs.

Campus Biotech is open to Australian biotechnology companies interested in establishing European offices or R&D facilities in Geneva.

The Human Brain Project (HBP) is also based on the Swiss Health Valley site. In January this year, the European Commission announced the HBP as one of its two Future Emerging Technologies flagship programs. Coordinated at the EPFL, the EU1.19 billion (AU$1.7 billion) program will federate 80 international research institutions over 10 years to pursue work on understanding the human brain.

For more information contact the Greater Geneva Berne Area (GGBa), Western Switzerland’s Economic Development Agency.
Contact person: Iris Gaudras, email: i.gaudras@ggba-switzerland.ch, phone : +41 79 253 4638.