Ireland has an enviable position in the life sciences industry, with nine of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies in the world based here. The State is the world’s third-largest exporter of pharmaceuticals, shipping more than €80 billion a year in exports, according to the IDA. According to Ibec, meanwhile, the biopharmachem sector in Ireland comprises more than 100 companies and employs around 50,000 people, with a further 21,000 jobs expected to be added in the next three years.
That employment figure includes around a quarter of the Republic’s PhDs, something that underlines the hugely important link between industry and academia that has helped the sector flourish in recent years.
Collaboration between industry and academia is essential for driving innovation and addressing complex healthcare challenges, and these partnerships play a crucial role in accelerating the development of novel therapeutics, says Sinead Keogh, director of BioPharmaChem Ireland, the Ibec group that represents the sector.
“As competition intensifies, these collaborations are vital not only for sustaining innovation and improving global health outcomes but also for reinforcing Ireland’s position as a leader in advanced medicine research, fostering high-value job creation and future investment,” she says.
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Ireland is well positioned to respond to the next wave of innovation if we invest, Keogh says. “New modalities are paving the way for safer and more effective treatment for unmet diseases, including antibodies, protein peptides, cell therapy, gene therapy, vaccines and RNA therapeutics. Seven out of the 10 top-selling biopharma products in 2024 are new modalities and this is projected to rise to nine by 2029. These breakthroughs will drive significant growth in the biopharma industry over the next decade.”
Ireland has done a good job over the years in leveraging its many advantages in this area, including our membership of the EU, having an English-speaking workforce with a pipeline of Stem graduates, and our strength in quality and regulatory compliance, notes Research Ireland’s scientific programme manager, Dr Finnian Hanrahan. Research has a huge role in underpinning this, he points out, with the research centre model – which involves collaboration between industry and academic partners – playing a key role.
“Once you reach a certain critical mass, companies definitely want to be here,” says Hanrahan. “It’s the full ecosystem that attracts companies, and research is a very important part of that. It doesn’t get talked about enough, but you do hear a lot of talk about the knowledge economy and the research and higher education system. It’s the PhDs that are coming through, not just our programmes but the other funders as well, and the universities. That’s what feeding the talent pipeline and companies can never get enough of that talent. It connects them in a deep way with the country.”
Notwithstanding the quality and excellence in the manufacturing sector, the research activity provides a further degree of stickiness for companies in this area.
“We are a manufacturing base but there’s always talk of manufacturing moving or reshoring and we need to stay on top of our game in many ways, but we need to have a deep value proposition, and this is where research comes in. The investment proposition is that we want you to base your manufacturing here, but you can also do a lot more here. You can run excellent trials here and there are really great skills in digital technology, for example.”
One of the standout models of industry-academic collaboration is the SSPC, based at the University of Limerick, which involves a wide range of academic investigators working with 50 industrial partners to address key challenges facing the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical industries.
NIBRT, located in Dublin, meanwhile, specialises in biological manufacturing, offering training and research support across the entire process, from upstream cell engineering to final product fill and finish. The recent launch of NIBRT’s Concept advanced therapeutics facility marks a significant milestone, focusing on cell and gene-based therapies, along with other novel therapeutics and vaccines. The global cell and gene therapy market, valued at approximately $21.28 billion (€20.23 billion) in 2024, is projected to reach around $117.46 billion by 2034.
Boosting Ireland’s research, development and innovation investment is vital to compete globally and take advantage of the vast opportunities in this sector, Keogh notes.
“Overall, our investment in research, development and innovation (RDI) lags significantly behind our peers in Europe and OECD countries,” she says. “For instance, we allocate only 0.96 per cent of our budget to RDI, compared to the EU average of 1.43 per cent and Denmark’s 1.8 per cent, a country of similar size to Ireland. The recent European Commission Draghi report emphasises the urgent need for increased support for research to boost the EU’s competitiveness, highlighting that the failure to meet the 3 per cent R&D expenditure target has contributed to the EU’s relative decline compared to the US and China.
“Boosting investment in our research capacity is necessary in the face of global competition. It also enables our centres to compete for EU Horizon Europe funding, Disruptive Technologies Innovation funding, innovation partnerships and funding from industry, both locally and globally.”
One of the more interesting developments in this area is how once divergent areas of innovation are converging, with developments in ICT, for example, impacting on life science. As Keogh says: “Digital technologies are playing a huge role and some of the leading players in this area are active here. They don’t care what sector you are in, they can work on it.”
ICT firm Huawei is among those active in industry/academia research, as Derek Collins, the company’s director of industry engagement and research collaboration, notes.
“We continue to increase our investment in basic research and theoretical breakthroughs, and we are working to build an open ecosystem for research collaboration between industry and academia,” says Collins. “We believe business should shape academic research and we have prompted extensive collaboration with universities and research institutions. These efforts support highly uncertain innovation projects and new ways to improve efficiency.”
