Page 12 - sme-report-2021

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Deep Dive: Berlin

Berlin is both the capital and Hospital, and more than 40 non- Finally, the capital region also
the largest city in Germany, with university research institutions, provides established structures
more than 3.6M inhabitants at least 17 of which focus on the for life science companies (34
at the end of 2019. While the life sciences. large life science companies,
German industry primarily 255 biotech companies, and
resides in southern parts of In detail, Berlin’s particular 332 medical technology
15
the country, many German and strengths lie in public sector companies) . Among the
international companies are R&D spending at 1.5 times of bioinformatics ventures of the
headquartered in Berlin. The the German and 1.8 times of the German capital region, we find
region has one of the highest European average and non-R&D Genetek Biopharma and Biotx.ai.
proportions of SMEs: 181,581 innovation spending. This is Genetek Biopharma manufactures
SMEs compared to 633 reflected in excellent public- genetic diagnostic kits based
companies with more than 250 private co-publications, at 137% on QF-PCR technique – for
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employees . of the German and 169% of the detection of genetic diseases
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European average . and chromosomal anomalies
According to the ‘Regional and human DNA profiling
Innovation Scoreboard 2019’, Ventures in the domain typically kits used in forensics and
Berlin is characterised as reside in one of nine current kinship issues. Biotx.ai delivers
‘Innovation Leader +’, and has science parks, with many more predictive biomarkers as a basis
been so classified since 2012. under development at the time for decision support in precision
of this report. In comparison to medicine. The venture applies
In recent years, the city has Cambridge, the ecosystem has machine learning techniques to
become a well-known centre for seen fewer companies with large automatically select hypotheses
technology-oriented ventures, scale exits in the past. Thus from life science data and
particularly in e-commerce, even though more and more eventually diagnose previously
financial technologies, data capital flows into the region undiagnosed patients using
sciences and analytics. The by venture capital funds, early- polygenic analysis.
region provides broad access stage and growth investment are
to scientific insights and highly- heavily complemented by public
trained talent at 11 public investors. This being said, early-
universities, including Europe’s stage venture rounds are larger
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largest university hospital, than the global average .
Charité University Medicine

13 Regional Innovation Scoreboard, Berlin – Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs – European Commission. https://ec.europa.eu/growth/tools-databases/
regional-innovation-monitor/base-profile/berlin (visited in 2019).
14 Startup Genome – Berlin. https://startupgenome.com/ecosystems/berlin.
15 Life Sciences Report 2019/2020 – Berlin Partner for Business and Technology https://www.berlin-partner.de/fileadmin/user_upload/01_chefredaktion/02_pdf/
publikationen/Life-Sciences-Report_en.pdf (2020).

Berlin