ACADEMIA

WASHINGTON -- BIO 2003 On the way to becoming a leading German biotechnology cluster -- Saxony stops at BIO 2003. "After our successful participation at BIO 2002 last year, we have expanded our engagement for Saxony at this year's tradeshow. We want to show the international biotechnology branch that biosaxony is on its way to becoming a leading biotech-cluster in Germany and that it has advanced tremendously since 2002", says Saxon State Minister for Economics and Labor, Dr Martin Gillo. The carefully defined region, biosaxony, is situated in Eastern Germany. The German state of Saxony invested more than $ 230 million over a period of 5 years to provide a high concentration of R&D companies who are partnering with academia to pioneer the very latest advances in biotechnology. The state, as only one of few German regions, achieved a growth in the biotechnology sector in the difficult year 2002. Biosaxony also improved its position and now ranks 8th out of 30 biotechnology centers in Germany, in 2000 the region made it to 13th place. Under the label "biosaxony", the Free State of Saxony presents itself together with six companies: Biotype AG, Labor Diagnostics Leipzig, Linde-KCA -- Dresden, Cenix BioScience, Gene Bridges and Apogepha Pharmaceutical. The Saxon booth is, with more than 100 square meters, one of the largest ones in the German pavilion. Gary Stevens, British citizen and CEO of DNA engineering company Gene Bridges recently located his company's headquarters in biosaxony to take advantage of the area's unique concentration of biotech expertise. Similarly, Christophe Echeverri, Canadian citizen and CEO of the genomics company Cenix BioScience recently located his company's operations within the region for the same reason. U.S. companies are also eyeing biosaxony, due to the low-cost of facilities as well as access to leading experts in fields ranging from genomics and bioinformatics to tissue engineering and drug discovery. Unique Cooperation between Science, Business and Government The main focus of the multi-million dollar initiative lies in the subsidized establishment of regional biotechnology centers in Leipzig and Dresden. The recently opened "Bio City Leipzig," for example, is concentrating heavily on research in the field of environmental biotechnology and biomedicine, and at the same time is acting as an incubator for start-up companies. Three quarters of the 20,000 square meters of laboratory and production space in this one part of biosaxony are rented out to start-ups and established biotech companies. One quarter is used by the University of Leipzig. "In addition to being priced very affordably, we also benefited from being able to have our space designed to our own specifications," says Jorg Gabert, CEO of Labor Diagnostics Leipzig, Germany. Nobel Prize laureate James D. Watson, who co-discovered the double helix structure of DNA, is impressed by the Saxon biotech landscape. At the opening of Bio City Leipzig he said that he thinks that Leipzig has the potential to become the first large German center of genome research. His aspirations for the biotech center Leipzig can be summarized in one visionary sentence: "I hope that Bio City Leipzig will one day be compared to Boston or San Francisco."