Background

The region hosts top national expertise in life sciences and health technologies. The focus is especially in research and business operation in pharmaceutical and diagnostics industries, as well as functional food and materials technology. Half of the turnover of the Finnish medical industry is created in the Turku Region and the Health Turku cluster, coordinated by the Turku Science Park Ltd. comprises more than 100 companies as well as universities and research institutes and a hospital district.

As an example from the cluster, “Auria Clinical Informatics” is an EU-accredited Digital Innovation Hub and gathers information from many hospital districts to create a “360-degree” view of patient care, and represents the first fully operational bio-bank in Finland. As the strongest expertise cluster of the life science field in Finland, and a pioneer in business operations, Health Turku also runs a national Life Science Accelerator and organizes the largest annual drug development and diagnostics industry event- the HealthBIO seminar. Life sciences and health are spearheads of research also at the universities; productive and intensive cooperation between research and companies creates an atmosphere for innovation and opportunities for commercialization of products. Health Turku stakeholders are active in various networks such as the Council of European BioRegions (CEBR), Euro Bioimaging, ScanBalt BioRegion, and European Diagnostics Cluster Alliance (EDCA). Two of cluster's larger companies, Orion Corporation and PerkinElmer Inc have together with local universities and SMEs recently assembled a New Modalities Ecosystem supported by funding from Business Finland.

Is the region looking for international/European/interregional collaboration opportunities? Yes