Blockbuster prescription drugs sold worldwide that treat multiple sclerosis, cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases derive from Israeli biotechnology. Israel creates more medical devices per capita than any other country, and its life sciences exports earn more than $3 billion a year.
Israeli research is at the forefront of the emerging fields of stem-cell therapy and genomics, and two Israelis were awarded Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, the first to Profs. Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, and the second to Prof. Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science number among the many awards bestowed on the country's biotech scientists.
The pace of innovation, development and growth in Israel's biotechnology sector is unparalleled. Israel's biotech industry is the most aggressive in the world, with more startups per capita then any other country. Its 180 biotech companies - each built on a combination of academic excellence, a highly-skilled workforce, cutting-edge technological inventiveness and entrepreneurial daring - are creating therapeutic products, diagnostic tools and revolutionary drug-delivery techniques benefiting people all over the world.
Tailor-made for Israel
Innovation and perseverance: A small country with a population of only seven million and few natural resources, Israel's economy is necessarily one of innovation and perseverance. Demanding conditions - first in agriculture, then in defense and from there throughout its economy - set the stage for dramatic economic growth, as Israel transformed itself from a developing to a developed nation, and from an economy based on agriculture to one based on knowledge.
A highly educated workforce: With seven world-class universities, Israel is one of the most highly educated countries on the globe. Almost a quarter of its workforce has university degrees, and 12 percent of these have advanced degrees. Among the 750,000 people who immigrated to Israel from the Former Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 were hundreds of highly skilled engineers. They have enhanced Israel's technological talent-pool, giving the country the world's highest rate of scientists per capita (one in 200), 39 percent of whom specialize in life sciences.
The lessons of military service: Mandatory military service in Israel equips its young people with the connections, management skills and action-oriented entrepreneurial mindset critical for technological development.
Intimate links between researchers and entrepreneurs: Israeli universities were among the first worldwide to develop technology transfer organizations - professional companies tasked with helping Israeli researchers to commercialize their academic research by connecting them with national and multi-national companies.
US capital and markets and, particularly, its 1985 free trade agreement with Israel: The US as a trading partner helped fuel the high-tech boom of the 1980s and 1990s, which, in turn, created the conditions for Israel's biotechnology cluster.
Birth of biotech in Israel
While Israeli biotechnology embraces the whole biotech sphere - from animal vaccines and diagnostics to plant tissue culture, bioreactors, seeds, diagnostics and biopesticides - its emphasis is firmly on medical agents, diagnostics and cell- and tissue-therapies. Some 60 percent of Israeli biotech focuses on human therapeutics, including drug discovery, cell therapy and genetics. A further 20% of Israeli biotech companies produce diagnostic kits.
Biotechnology, the science which applies breakthroughs in molecular biology and immunochemistry to diagnosis and therapy, was born in the late 1970s. In many ways, it is tailor-made for Israel, being rooted in innovation and perseverance; a highly educated workforce; the lessons of military service; intimate links between researchers and entrepreneurs; and US capital and markets and, particularly, the US 1985 free trade agreement with Israel.
Israel whimsically dates the birth of its biotechnology industry to 1936. This was when chemist Chaim Weizmann, later to be the country's first president, developed a process that produced acetone from the bacterium Clostridium acetobutylicum. It took almost six more decades, however, until the modern Israeli biotechnology industry was born, on the heels of the high-tech boom.