Swedish Centre to Support Technologies and Manufacturing

An Innovation center in Uppsala, set to boost the commercialisation of new technologies and support manufacturing capabilities in the life sciences sector has been opened by the Swedish government and GE Healthcare. The 2500 m2 (27,000 sq. ft.) Tester Center, houses four bioprocessing laboratories incorporating GE Healthcare technologies for testing new discoveries for the production of biopharmaceuticals.

Having identified life sciences as one of its top five partnership programmes the Swedish government has invested around EUR 10 million (SEK 100 million) in the project, in efforts to increase collaboration between the public sector, business and academia to build the country’s competitiveness and innovation capability. Earlier this year, the government opened an office that is fully dedicated to life sciences.

BioLamina, a Swedish producer of protein-based reagents (laminins) employed in the development of therapeutic cells from stem cells is the first company to run a project at the new centre. It recently entered into a collaboration with Novo Nordisk to support development of new cell therapies targeting Parkinson’s disease, heart failure and loss of vision.

“With increasing demand for our high-quality laminins within the cell therapy industry, we need to scale-up our production capacity,” says Kristian Tryggvason, CEO of BioLamina. “Testa Center gives us a unique possibility to do this internally instead of relying on large global contract manufacturers.”

“Testa Center was created to advance innovation, but it also strengthens the life sciences talent pool in Sweden. We can learn from smaller companies with fast and flexible ways of working. Testa Center is a real-life example of a successful public-private-partnership that has brought together many key players in Sweden. The engagement and buzz around the centre has been astounding and I believe that many discoveries will be taken to the real world with the help of Testa Center,” says Lotta Ljungqvist, CEO of GE in the Nordics and CEO of Testa Center.