Exciting times

Exciting times – and possibly times of historical significance – for the life sciences in Sweden. As a journalist and editor of a niche editorial media service, I am privileged enough to get to reflect and review interesting and – to say the least – exciting developments in the industry in this country.

To say the editorial challenge is difficult is an understatement, but it is made easier by the fact that our media service Läkemedelsmarknaden is restricted to the pharmaceutical area, which together with medical technology and biotechnology is one of the three pillars of the life science sector.

What I have to do as an editor is keep up with a daily stream of press releases, political initiatives and the rest of what makes up “media noise”. The idea is to select what we believe – with our knowledge of our readers and subscribers – to be relevant for our target groups. We also have to put together a jigsaw puzzle made up of a large number of news items, events and decisions – interesting in themselves – so as to try to get an overview, to understand the whole picture and to identify trends. 

When “evaluating news”, as it is called in journalism jargon, it is important to avoid falling into the classic trap of exaggerating the significance of any individual event. It is easy to end up falling into such traps because we, as people, can make the mistake of exaggerating the longterm
significance of individual events – while at the same time having difficulty seeing and grasping the big picture when looking at a course of events. Put another way: sometimes we cannot see the wood for the trees.

At present there are several interacting elements that suggest that Sweden could actually get to sharpen its competitiveness as a national market in the global life science sector. Next to the asterisks in the list below you will find some of the events and developments in our time, which
– according to Läkemedelsmarknaden’s analysis – are going to be significant in terms of the vital force in work currently being done in the life sciences. This initiative is now being taken within Swedish trade and industry, the Swedish state, the academic world, within patient/user organisations and at a county council and regional level.

• The Social Democrat/Green Party government’s decision to make life sciences one of the most prioritised areas for investment in growth, innovation and development, together with climate, energy and the environment. The first steps taken are ambitious, with the establishment of an Innovation Council and the re-cruitment of Anders Lönnberg as national coordinator for life sciences.

It continues to be something of a honeymoon period for the government and all the different players in the life science area. There has been a lot of heavy criticism, for example from the opposition Christian Democrats’ trade and industry policy spokesperson Penilla Gunther, who believes the government’s grant to amount to no more than “a bit of loose change to be divided among several players”.

There comes a time after the honeymoon period when the surrounding world starts to demand to see results from the government’s fine words and financial subsidies. We are not there yet, but there could be a crescendo of critical questions from the political opposition and from the life science players as soon as the most important political and business event in Sweden, the Almedalen week in July, and certainly the nearer we get to the next election.

• The establishment of a national committee for clinical research within the Science Foundation. The new committee – based in Gothenburg – has taken up the challenge of creating a national arena for clinical research with both great enthusiasm and a sense of purpose. Sweden’s budding national arena for clinical research in the form of a country-wide node centre national committee for clinical research (incidentally, it is high time the committee hit on a good name and a catchy and simply communicable abbreviation!) and its six nodes around the country are a pragmatic and eagerly awaited attempt at creating a Swedish arena for pharmaceutical studies, pharmaceutical tests and other forms of research in the medical field. The vision is that pharmaceutical companies, people with different sickness diagnoses and other interested parties who want to, for example, run clinical studies in Sweden should be able to identify research subjects and establish easily and in one location on the Web what studies and tests are being carried out in the country. That is – if accomplished – without a doubt something that make Sweden attractive to international pharmaceutical companies. It should be possible to establish such a centre – at least one individual multinational pharmaceutical company has tried in vain to create just that type of online portal for clinical research in Sweden.
• Sweden is slowly but surely becoming more and more of an integrated health and medical services market for companies that introduce new medical therapies. By establishing what is known as the collaborative model, the New Therapies Board (NT-Rådet) expert panel and a number of other initiatives are creating opportunities for the 21 county councils and regions (who are paying) and the public authorities to coordinate their activities. It increases the speed of introductions, improves costeffectiveness and minimises the risk of duplication of work in the time between a company getting marketing approval and patients being able to start being treated with the new product or service as a matter of course. 
• AstraZeneca observed recently that the Swedish Dental and Pharmaceutical Benefits Agency was the quickest in the world to carry out a healthcare cost evaluation of one of the company’s pharmaceutical products. With the increased speed of introductions of new therapies comes growth in the international pharmaceutical industry’s interest in Sweden as an establishment nation for new products, at the same time as health and medical services staff have the satisfaction of working with the latest state-of-the-art and hopefully best tools in healthcare. This creates a positive spiral that means that Sweden’s international competitiveness as a life science nation rises.
• AstraZeneca has invested heavily in Mölndal outside Gothenburg, which is currently one of the pharmaceutical company’s three most important centres for research and development. The establishment of an “airlift” between Cambridge and Gothenburg, making it possible for AstraZeneca’s employees to switch to and fro between the two important research websites in order to advance and develop their skills and expertise. 
• The Wallenberg power house’s both stated and actual financial efforts to return Sweden to the absolute top of the world league where Swedish clinical research was 15–20 years ago. During a period of ten years the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation is investing 1,7 billion Swedish kronor in research and development centres in Stockholm, Gothenburg, Lund and Umeå.
• Swedish legislation is about to be aligned with the EU’s Unitary Patent system and Europe’s new Unified Patent Court. The hope among advocates of the unitary system – there is plenty of strong criticism as well! – is that the new patent system should contribute to an increase in the pace of innovation and thereby growth in areas such as the life sciences. The Swedish government and its agencies have acted with foresight and vision, which has reaped the dividend that the Nordic-Baltic division of the Court is to have its seat in Stockholm. The working language will be English. 
• The Social Democrat/Green Party government continues to finance the investments made by its predecessors in the non-socialist Alliance government through higher academic research, such as SciLifeLab in Stockholm. Research and science minister Helene Hellmark Knutsson said at the clinical conference on clinical research in Gothenburg earlier in April that she is almost convinced that there is broad cross-party parliamentary support for the size of finance package being put forward in the forthcoming research policy proposal. 
• Several strong life science clusters are growing up around the country. The biggest investment to date has been in Stockholm-Solna where Hagastaden is emerging in a research-intensive environment with a focus on health and medical services and information and communication technology (ICT). Research on medicine and ICT brings together several ventures in medical research and digital health at Karolinska Institutet, KTH, Uppsala University and Stockholm University.

The ambition is crystal-clear. The initiative should make it obvious for international pharmaceutical companies, medical technology companies and other companies to choose between Boston, Cambridge and Stockholm-Solna when they make decisions about where to place collaborative projects and other life science activities.

These elements seem to be working broadly in a positive direction, i.e. they improve Sweden’s chances of improving what is already a strong position as a life science nation. The negative elements are in the divided health and medical services structure that result when county councils and regions fail to co-operate in order to be able to make synergies by means of co-ordination. Swedish data and privacy legislation prevents Sweden from becoming champion of the world in the field of real world medical evidence, the data that shows the actual medical effect and cost-effectiveness that patients and taxpayers get from medicines and other treatments after they have passed the test and approval stage and are available on the market for health and medical services.

The editorial office for Läkemedelsmarknaden – and its sister publication Apoteksmarknaden – has a part to play in this development in terms of delivering, with a critical approach, editorial “need to know” news and analysis in our publications and with our seminars and other events – where we deliver “journalism on stage” – as regards life science in Sweden, the Nordic region and the EU.

My colleagues and I are fortunate to be able to carry out and develop editorial monitoring in what I consider to be a journalistic golden age. What we have are rapidly improving conditions for delivering fast news combined with in-depth detail. This is done by making the most of the opportunities the Web and digital distribution channels provide to us editors to direct our readers to relevant reports, surveys, political speeches, statistical summaries and other documents in their original form.

Jonny Sågänger
Editor
Läkemedelsmarknaden(1)

 

1 Läkemedelsmarknaden (“The Pharmaceutical Market”) – and its sister publication Apoteksmarknaden (“The Pharmacy Market”) – is a media service that primarily monitors economic, policy and legal issues concerning pharmaceuticals and the life science sector. We have been delivering daily news, detailed articles and analyses via our newsletter since 2002, as well as providing seminars, the professional network Pharma Network, training courses and other events.