Located in Southwest Finland, Turku Business Region gathers together the Turku region businesses, universities, organisations and municipalities, utilizing the Triple Helix model. The 22,000 companies, six universities, and an extensive co-operation network of different players in the region speed up the generation of new products and services as well as growth of business operations and local well-being.

Turku Business Region is home to the oldest and strongest health cluster in Finland, HealthTurku, an expertise centre for pharma, diagnostics and health technology, and a frontrunner in the functional foods research. 

An important area in Turku’s life science sector is the evolving of real-world data, where the cluster has initiatives through for example Finland’s first hospital biobank and Auria Clinical Informatics, which is an EU-recognized Digital Innovation Hub, or the Turku PET Centre, which is one of Europe’s largest and most internationally renowned imaging service units. The PET Centre focuses primarily on cell energy metabolism, brain research and drug development imaging and is part of Turku BioImaging, who coordinates the pan-European ESFRI research infrastructure Euro-BioImaging (EuBI). 

HealthTurku is home to more than 120 companies in the life science sector, ranging from top international pharmaceutical and diagnostics corporations, such as Bayer, Orion Pharma and PerkinElmer, to promising startups. Turku region companies are global market leaders e.g. in genetic screening of newborns and pregnant women, cardiac markers, and development and production of birth control implants. 21 out of the 22 drugs that have been developed in Finland have come from Turku. Today, still about 75% of Finnish pharmaceutical export and 50% of Finnish in vitro diagnostics export come from Turku.

HealthTurku ecosystem is based on a robust, cutting-edge infrastructure and research environment, coordinated by Health Campus Turku. It offers numerous testing and simulation platforms to businesses, all collected on the TERTTU Testing and Development Platform. HealthTurku hosts also a unique Werstas Labs laboratory co-workspace for life science and health companies. Werstas Labs offers e.g. office spaces, common and private laboratories, basic laboratory equipment, maintenance, and complementary services with a tradition of over 20 years. 

The co-ordination of the business and innovation services in the Turku region is managed by the regional development company Turku Science Park Ltd, whose mission is to create new business opportunities for the local companies, strengthen the growth and co-operation between companies, academia, and the public sector, and to promote the development of the region as an attractive environment for business operations. It offers services throughout the life cycle of a company from start-up and growth, to internationalization and invest-in services, and functions as an important catalyst for building partnerships between Finnish and foreign players.

Ongoing transnational cooperation initiatives:

• BIC Biomarker Commercialization Project: The purpose of this Baltic Sea Region (BSR) consortium is to create tools for supporting and overcoming the challenges of biomarker commercialization. The project’s budget is EUR 2.55 million and is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Interreg Baltic Sea Region Programme with EUR 1.96 million. 

Project webpage: https://biomarker.nu/

• PRIVASA – a synthetic data initiative to boost the utilization of patient data in health research 

HealthTurku interesting facts:

• Since the 1980s, most of the innovative original drugs that have been developed in Finland have come from the Turku region.
• MIRENA® (Bayer), which is Finland's largest pharmaceutical export product, was developed and is produced in Turku. It is sold in more than 130 countries from the United States to Far East. In 2019, Mirena sales amounted to 1 223 M €.
• At Perkin Elmer Wallac in Turku, a pioneer in neonatal screening, a team of 600+ people develops and produces products that enable screening of 40 million newborns annually in over 100 countries. In total, around 500 million babies have been screened so far.
• Xylitol ®, a functional food ingredient preventing tooth caries was developed in Turku 
• Benecol®, one of the first functional foods in the world was developed in Turku. 
• HealthTurku coordinates the national ProHealth program, an accelerator program, focusing on products or services within professional, regulated healthcare.
• HealthTurku holds a Bronze Label for cluster excellence as part of the European Cluster Excellence Initiative (ECEI), the only life-science cluster in Finland to ever receive the label.
• Health Turku is actively participating in the Baltic Sea Region development projects and is a member of ScanBalt BioRegion, the Council of European BioRegions (CEBR) and Enterprise Europe Network.

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