Abstract:
Swedish pharmaceutical industry and research
Being a small country with only 10 million inhabitants, Sweden has a proud history of successful organic growth of its pharmaceutical industry with companies such as Kabi [the first company to license Genentech's recombinant DNA technology later overtaken by Pharmacia (subsequently merging with Upjohn, and later being closed as a part of Pfizer)], Hässle (bought by Astra) and Astra (merged with Zeneca to form AstraZeneca). Even today, after the closure of three out of four major global pharma research sites located in Sweden, pharmaceuticals still represent one of Sweden's largest export products (a large part originating from AstraZenca's manufacturing plant in Södertälje). The aftermath of the industry's turbulent reorganization has created several geographical areas with strong life science innovation capacity [i.e. Stockholm/Uppsala (51% of life science companies), Malmö/Lund (19%) and Göteborg (17%)], hosting a plethora of smaller biotech companies (the largest now being Medivir outside Stockholm) [1].
Citation: Per I. Arvidsson, Kristian Sandberg, Karin Forsberg-Nilsson Open For Collaboration: An Academic Platform For Drug Discovery And Development At Scilifelab http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.drudis.2016.06.026
Available online: 29 June 2016
Copyright: © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd This is an open access article under the CC BY license(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
