Billionaire envisions Swiss centre as change agent

Swiss billionaires Hansjörg Wyss, right, and Ernesto Bertarelli, are making Geneva fertile ground for new advances in biotechnology and medical technologies Keystone

Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss says he hopes a new centre for biotech research in Geneva will spawn new start-ups that advance health and society more than it garners new prizes.

The 79-year-old entrepreneur, reportedly worth $6.1 billion (CHF5.8 billion), told Swiss newspaper Le Temps in an interview published on Saturday that he believes the major new biotech research initiative called “Campus Biotech” already is headed for success.

“A start-up company like Google is changing the world, but a Nobel Prize is a reflection of past excellence,” he said of the centre he helped launch in the former headquarters of Merck Serono in Geneva. “Something fantastic is bound out of there!”

The 40,000 square metre site was inaugurated this week. The main backers were Wyss, who made part of his fortune selling artificial joint maker Synthes to Johnson & Johnson in 2011 for over $21 billion, and Swiss billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli, whose grandfather founded Serono, a pharmaceutical company he sold to German drug and chemical maker Merck in 2007.

The two businessmen formed a consortium with Lausanne’s Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) and the University of Geneva to create the centre with a donation of CHF100 million (US$105 million) from the Wyss Foundation.

Wyss said in the interview that the interdisciplinary scientific centre, created along the lines of the Wyss Institute at Harvard, will help position the Geneva region at the forefront of research in neuroscience and bioengineering.

“We support initiatives that have little chance of success a priori because they are very risky,” he said.

What might the “fantastic” new creations coming out of the centre look like?

“I do not know, but it will be a combination of all current technologies,” he added. “The bionic man is already there, there is a project in Zurich to change the valves in the heart of newborns using stem cells. Again, we need engineers who will work with scientists.”