SP Process Development (SPPD), formed in 2013, offers services within drug development and manufacturing, but is far from being a new kid in the block. SPPD assimilated decades of experience and state of the art equipment when it acquired parts of former AZ Process and Pharmaceutical R&D unit in Södertälje.

The world’s largest randomised trial to date of a medical device in myocardial infarction patients was performed by applying the Swedish patient registry SWEDEHEART. No less than 7,244 patients were included in the study with minimal extra work since patient data was easily accessible.

A clear example of the power of Swedish patient registries comes from a study published in 2014 in The Lancet. Short-time survival over a six-year period (2004 – 2010) in all Swedish (390 000 patients) vs. UK patients (120 000 patients) treated for myocardial infarction was studied.

“We are now collaborating with Karolinska Institutet in order to explore how real world data can be used to provide meaningful insights from ongoing patient care into research and development. We see Sweden as the best place for conducting such studies thanks to access to national patient registries and the opportunity to collaborate with a world leading team mastering this complex field.”

Uppsala-based U-CAN, with its continuously growing repository of unique material from longitudinal studies, welcomes collaboration projects aimed at improving diagnosis, prognosis, treatment and ultimately patient outcomes. As of spring 2016, U-CAN has already initiated such collaborations with both leading pharmaceutical companies and international cancer institutes.

The Swedish company Biovica has developed a blood test (DiviTum™) that provides accurate measures of cell-division rates in blood. Testing and validation was accelerated by ready access to blood samples from Karolinska University Hospital’s biobank. These had been collected during a clinical study including 287 women with breast cancer undergoing two different kinds of chemotherapy.

Swedish AMRA and one of the world´s largest pharmaceutical companies have begun a collaboration to assess fat and muscle measurements in magnetic resonance (MR) images of 7,000 subjects registered in the UK Biobank. The collaboration aims to help provide a better understanding of the relationship between body composition and risk for obesity related diseases, as well as a broader understanding of conditions linked to body composition.

The Swedish government has made major investments in the country’s life sciences research infrastructure; the latest research bill setting new record levels. SciLifeLab and Max IV are both national resources. ESS, The European Spallation Source, which is intended to become a resource for European scientists, is under development. These resources are intended for advancing the understanding of human biology and hence leading to new innovations in the fields of prevention, diagnosis and treatment.

Sweden’s technology-driven environment, characterised as it is by close collaboration between academia, healthcare and industry, has produced many notable medtech innovations that have saved lives and alleviated symptoms for millions of patients globally. The pacemaker, the gamma knife and renal dialysis are just a few examples.