ACES profile: An architect of the innovation system

That technology transfer is an increasingly professionalised and systematic business is down to pioneers of the art like Hans Wigzell, the architect of the innovation system at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, one of the world’s most research-intensive medical universities.

Not content to rest on his laurels as well-respected immunologist – and member of the great and the good – following his appointment at President of the Karolinska in 1995 Wigzell set about the creation of a robust system for transferring research out of the lab and into new healthcare products.

His first initiative was to establish Karolinska Innovation AB as the Institute’s dedicated technology transfer arm.

Recognising that innovation can be as much black art as defined practice, this was accompanied by the creation of the Centre for Medical Innovation, and the appointment of a business studies professor with a brief to research the medical innovation process.

Wigzell’s vision of – and evident commitment to – a formal, professional, technology transfer function meant that in its formative years Karolinska Innovation was able to attract managers from Pharmacia and AstraZeneca as employees, bringing drug industry focus and disciplines to its operation.

Backing from investors

The self-effacing Swede also managed to persuade investors to support his vision, raising a €65 million venture fund to fund early stage projects, and in 2002 setting up Karolinska Development, a fund that has raised around €100 million to support a hand-picked portfolio of 40 companies spun out from ten Nordic universities. Wigzell continued as chairman of Karolinska Development after standing down as President of the Karolinska Institute in 2004.

In the midst of global financial chaos and the flight from risk, Karolinska Development has just closed a new funding round, raising SEK 147 million (around €13.25 million), securing its investment programme for a further two years. Though companies in the portfolio have reached Phase I and Phase II clinical trials and are now what Wigzell terms “semi-mature”, he admits he is, “still selling dreams”.

“I feel 2010 will be the crucial year in terms of outcomes,” he says.

Another of Wigzell’s dreams is Stockholm Bioscience. This will be the science and business park element of a €5 billion project tying together the university campuses of the Karolinska, the Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University with the Karolinska University Hospital. He started lobbying for the vision in 1999 and it was five years before the agreement was reached to buy the land. Work has now started but the project will not be completed until 2016–17.

Three spurs to innovation

For Wigzell, the imperative to translate medical research into products is three-pronged: to improve healthcare; to make scientific careers more interesting and rewarding; and to provide a return for public spending on science.

“It’s a very logical thing if you work in research. I’m in the medical field: since what we are doing is supported by society – in anticipation that it will help to ameliorate disease – it would be grossly unethical for a place [like the Karolinska] not to try and translate [research] into better treatments.”

While this translation can happen through small-scale academic trials, for new treatments to get to all those that need them, there has to be commercial involvement by industry.

“Another part of the inspiration for the Karolinska Institute is that it also makes a career structure for scientists beyond the two conventional strands of bench research and pedagogy,” says Wigzell.

And there is a further benefit in that attempting to translate research forces scientists to think about the relevance of what they are doing, and explain it to non-specialists. “Scientists are required to step down from the ivory tower,” Wigzell says.

The need for scientists to communicate their work is a broader passion for Wigzell, who in the past has used the theatre to relate aspects of science to a lay audience. “Over 12 years the show was always sold out,” Wigzell recalls, adding that some of his colleagues and professors at the Karolinska thought his participation was inappropriate.

And it would be hard to find fault with Wigzell’s stellar academic record, which stretches from being named Norway’s Young Scientist of the Year in 1974 to receiving an honorary doctorate from the Feinstein Institute in New York last year.

As professor of immunology since 1981 and author of over 700 scientific papers, Wigzell has benefited from public spending on research and has always defended basic research staunchly, both for its curiousity value and for the potential longer-term commercial rewards. “It’s an additional joy for me that technology transfer demonstrates the value of basic science, with no reduction in academic freedom.”

This, says Wigzell, “is the best defence there is for basic science. If it never led to anything that improved the life of citizens, who would ever invest in it?

For most, turning basic science into products requires a touch of alchemy. But for Wigzell technology transfer can be a precise art. “Many universities in Europe and the US may fail [in tech transfer], but that is because they are not professionalised in doing it.”

Still, he acknowledges it is “very complicated” establishing a sustainable company. In particular, the changing business models and objectives of the pharmaceutical industry make it hard to groom start-ups and set them on their course.

“Right now it’s chaos. But the thing to remember is that the most successful companies come from the top science. And you need fantastic scientific expertise to be part of any venture.”