Big player: the Bavarian biotech cluster

With a track record of successful innovation, Munich is one of the leading lights of European biotech. LSIPR went to visit.

As of May 25, 2013, Munich can claim to host the best football team in Europe. With some of the strongest players from across the world anchored by a core of home-grown talent, Bayern Munich are sweeping all before them.

Like its main football club, Munich’s biotechnology sector is a success story: if not necessarily the undoubted best, then regularly challenging for the major honours. In 2012, 348 companies in the biotechnology and pharma sectors were headquartered or had subsidiaries operating in the region. The Bavarian Biotech Cluster employs more than 26,000 people, not including academics working in Bavarian research institutions. In the city of Munich alone, more than 19,000 people work in the industry.

The Bavarian cluster is managed by BioM, a not-for-profit that provides consulting to start-ups, business development support and PR services to the sector. Linked to that organisation is m4, which describes itself as “the joint biotech initiative in Greater Munich that pools the strengths of the hospitals and scientific institutes, the biotech and pharmaceutical companies and the cluster management company BioM”.