Irish Betting on Biotech
By Daithí Ó hAnluain
2:00 a.m. Dec. 5, 2001 PST
CORK, Ireland -- The Celtic Tiger, envied for its rapid industrial success in the 1990s, is employing the same formula to stimulate biotech here.
Low corporation taxes, a highly skilled work force and pure, blind eagerness attracted U.S. technology companies in droves for the last 10 years.
The upshot was that Ireland became the world's largest exporter of software. Ireland exports more software than the United States because it's the European and Middle East export node for many U.S. companies. For instance, Microsoft and IBM have their European operations based here. Meanwhile, homegrown firms such as Iona, Baltimore, Smartforce, Parthus and Trintech have become international successes.
Now Ireland is looking to biotech as another major plank in the country’s platform to launch its future prosperity.
"Biotech in Ireland is at the stage where IT was 10 years ago," says Dr. Kevin Donnelly, research innovation fund manager at Enterprise Ireland, an agency to promote indigenous entrepreneurs.
It's unsurprising that Ireland has locked onto this emerging sector.
Health is a guaranteed market for the future, says Donnelly. "Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die. People will always get sick. We cured TB in the '40s, but the hospitals didn't close. You can guarantee that in a thousand year's time people will want to live six weeks longer than they are living at the moment. Healthcare will always be a major industry." And biotech is set to become a major growth area in medicine.
He applies the same rationale to information communications technology (ICT): "What are the ideas that have always been around? Well, writing was one of the earliest technologies to develop and we're still perfecting it. So, communication has always been there and it will be there in the future as well."
On this logic the oldest and second oldest professions in the world -- war and sex -- will probably thrive in 100 years time, too, and looking at the major applications of technology today, it's difficult to fault Donnelly's reasoning.
Ireland's success in IT is well known, but its thriving pharma sector is less famous.
The country is, with Puerto Rico and Singapore, one of the top three destinations for pharmaceuticals internationally because of its low 10 percent corporation tax. Nine of the top 10 pharma companies in the world have operations in Ireland. Over 120 overseas companies employ 17,000 people and export US$18 billion annually. This represents over 25 percent of total exports and makes Ireland one of the largest exporters of pharmaceuticals and fine chemicals in the world.
Wyeth Medica, owned by American Home Products Corporation, is currently building the world's largest bio-pharmaceutical campus on a 90-acre site here. After it opens in 2005, it will employ 1,300 people at full production -– bringing the total AHPC workforce in Ireland to 3,000.
Now the government has created Science Foundation Ireland with a $798 million fund specifically for biotechnology and ICT. Over the next five years, the fund intends to enable third-level institutions to recruit and retain scholars capable of developing internationally significant research programs.
An American chemist, Dr. William Harris, founding president of Columbia University's Biosphere 2 Center, and former director for mathematical and physical sciences at the National Science Foundation in the United States, will head up the SFI.
So far the foundation has allotted $62 million to fund 10 principal investigators with a budget of $1.43 million a year to build research teams, of up to 12, focused on specific areas of Biotech or ICT ranging from genome research to photonics.
Projects can come from anywhere in the world but the research must be carried out in Ireland. After a recent call the foundation received 34 proposals costing $113 million from Ireland, the U.K., Canada, the United States and Japan. Those proposals are currently under review. The SFI is set to launch another call with a deadline early next year.
The goal of all this effort is both to help develop an international reputation for Ireland and, ultimately, create the expertise to boost the indigenous biotech sector to complement the international expertise here.
Irish indigenous biotech research has already thrown up a number of promising devices. A cancer detection device the size of a microchip is in the development stage here. Meanwhile a DNA-based system for tracking meat from the field where it was raised to the consumer's table is producing a profit for its inventors. In July, a team from National University of Ireland, Galway, licensed a DNA test to Roche Diagnostic.
The deal pulled in an up-front payment of $1.57 million and could generate up to $2.85 million a year in royalties. The test allows for the rapid testing of septicemia and meningitis, and it also has application in respiratory and STDs (sexually transmitted diseases). The technology provides results in a matter of hours instead of days with current methods. Its developers believe that could drop to minutes in three or four years.
"Today, maybe the world knows Irish inventiveness best through its artists and writers," Harris wrote in a recent article. "Tomorrow, they will know why our scientists deserve their respect and appreciation just as well."
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