Founded in 1998, the Swiss Biotech Association represents the interests of the Swiss biotech industry. To support its members in a competitive market, the Swiss Biotech Association works to secure favorable framework conditions and facilitate access to talents, novel technologies and financial resources. To strengthen and promote the Swiss biotech industry, the Swiss Biotech Association collaborates with numerous partners and life science clusters globally under the brand Swiss Biotech™.
The Swiss Biotech Association has established its own community for employees of its member companies. The community enables direct exchange between members, features a news section, provides files and information, shows discount codes for events and enables discussions within specific platform topics.
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Platform Leaders – Heike Bihlmann and Cathy Kroll
Regulatory issues are of great consequence to academia and industry researchers active in drug discovery and development.
The drug discovery and development process is extremely complex, especially for academics in biotech research as well as for small and medium sized start-ups from academia or spin-offs from industry. The issue is not so much the quality of the research but the knowledge and know-how on the relevant challenges and hurdles throughout the development process as well as an overview on methods and principles.
Platform Leader – Cathy Kroll
A biopharmaceutical, also known as a biologic(al) medical product, biological,or biologic, is any pharmaceutical drug product manufactured in, extracted from, or semisynthesized from biological sources. Different from chemically synthesized pharmaceuticals, they include vaccines, blood, or blood components, allergenics, somatic cells, gene therapies, tissues, recombinant therapeutic protein, and living cells used in cell therapy. Biologics can be composed of sugars, proteins, or nucleic acids or complex combinations of these substances, or may be living cells or tissues. They are isolated from natural sources—human, animal, or microorganism. Source; Wikipedia
Platform Leader – Roland Rutschmann, Curatis
Rare diseases
Rare diseases are diseases which affect a small number of people compared to the general population and specific issues are raised in relation to their rarity. In Europe, a disease is considered to be rare when it affects 1 person per 2000. A disease can be rare in one region, but common in another. There are also many common diseases whose variants are rare.
There are thousands of rare diseases. To date, six to seven thousand rare diseases have been discovered and new diseases are regularly described in medical literature. The number of rare diseases also depends on the degree of specificity used when classifying the different entities/disorders. Until now, in the field of medicine, a disease is defined as an alteration of the state of health, presenting as a unique pattern of symptoms with a single treatment.
Orphan drugs
The so-called ‘orphan drugs’ are intended to treat diseases so rare that sponsors are reluctant to develop them under usual marketing conditions.
The process from the discovery of a new molecule to its marketing is long (10 years in average), expensive (several tens of millions of euros) and very uncertain (among ten molecules tested, only one may have a therapeutic effect). Developing a drug intended to treat a rare disease does not allow the recovery of the capital invested for its research.
Orphan drugs may be defined as : Drugs that are not developed by the pharmaceutical industry for economic reasons but which respond to public health need.
Actually, the indications of a drug may also be considered as ‘ orphan ‘ since a substance may be used in the treatment of a frequent disease but may not have been developed for another, more rare indication.
Platform Leader – Cathy Kroll
Industrial Biotech covering the know-how and processes for the production of larger scale biotech products are of high importance for the Swiss Biotech sector. In combination with the concept and activities of biobased economy, industrial biotechnology will have a large impact on future production technologies.
The Industrial Biotech Platform gathers interest groups and stakeholder within: