BioWorld International Correspondent

VIENNA, Austria - Many of the high-tech jobs of the 1980s and '90s are low-tech jobs now, and increasingly are moving offshore to countries with lower labor costs. Biotechnology provides the opportunity for sustainable job creation, but Europe must ensure its education system can meet the skill needs of the industry.

"When we get companies to move to Ireland, we make sure that education reacts," Barry O'Leary, senior vice president of the Irish Development Agency, told delegates here Wednesday at the inaugural Cordia-EuropaBio Convention. "It is a challenge to make sure the education system responds; there is a mismatch worldwide between the skills coming out of universities and what pharma needs, according to the feedback we get from companies.

"We are in global competition [for inward investment] with countries like Singapore, rather than other countries in the EU," O'Leary said. "But once we get one plant, we get more, and given the high level of capital investment, these [companies] are not likely to move, unlike IT [companies]."

Abbott Laboratories has five plants in Ireland; Pfizer Inc. has seven. And 12 of the top 25 drugs in the world are manufactured in the country. Nine of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies have a presence in Ireland. Total inward investment in the life sciences industry stands at €40 billion, and at €34 billion per annum, pharmaceutical exports account for 26 percent of total exports.

"Now that there are more drugs based on biologics, Ireland needs to position itself in biopharmaceuticals," O'Leary said. A start has been made with investments by Genzyme Corp. and Allergan Inc., and Wyeth is currently making the largest capital investment in the history of the company, a €1.6 billion integrated manufacturing plant at Grange Castle, near Dublin.

"This will take five years to construct and validate and bring into full production, but after two years there are already 700 skilled staff on the payroll," O'Leary said. People who have been made redundant from IT companies are being retrained for careers in biologics. When complete the plant will employ 1,300.

Recent initiatives to provide the skills that will be needed to underpin the development of a biopharmaceutical cluster include the foundation of two new schools of pharmacy, establishment of a master's course in industrial pharmaceutical science, a national pilot plant for training the work force and a national bioprocessing center.

Biotechnology relies on a complex array of technologies, and the skills of the work force is one of the key issues in the development of biotechnology clusters, said Stephen Dahms, executive director of the Program for Education and Research in Biotech at the University of California at San Diego. "The problem is most universities don't understand the industry, government doesn't understand the industry, and work force providers don't understand it, either."

That is exemplified by the number of corporate universities that are being set up in the U.S. "These are growing like wildfire because the universities are not doing what companies need," Dahms said.

He added that the U.S and Europe have lessons to learn from each other. "The skills needed are the same in San Diego or Zurich, but the range of skills needed is unlikely to be available."

Dahms, who also is chairman of the U.S. BioIndustry Association Workforce Committee, said a further issue is that the skills require change as companies develop from discovery to development and commercialization. Over the product life cycle a typical biopharmaceutical company will need to fill about 300 job types, but Dahms said, "[People] in the U.S. are not trained to make the transition from research to development."

Georges Hubner, director of the Research Center for the Management of Bio-Industries in Liege, Belgium, said Europe must educate "managerial biotechnologists" who can bridge the gap between management and biotechnology. "We need to increase the supply of managerial training programs for scientists. There are not enough at this level for scientists to understand what management is, and what it involves."

The University of Liege is trying to launch an MBA program in life sciences. "There is an absolute need for scientists with Ph.D.s in the industry and they need this [training] to be able to manage companies."