A French study comparing the excellence of research at biomedical research institutes in the United States and Europe has highlighted the symbiotic relationship between basic research and a thriving biotech industry.

Philippe Pouletty, president of France Biotech, presented results from a preliminary study into leading institutes at a conference organized by Fondation pour l'Innovation Politique in Paris last week (June 3).

For 27 different centers, he and colleagues calculated a "Life Sciences Excellence Index," based on the number of articles published in journals with an impact factor of more than 20, divided by the total number of papers, and expressed as a percentage.

"The goal is to have a simple objective index which can be looked at for various institutions independently of their size, overall output, structure, and so on," Pouletty told The Scientist.

By this measure, the top 10 institutes were: the Salk Institute (12.4%), the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (7.8%), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (6.5%), Scripps Research Institute (5.1%), University of California at Berkley (4.5%), Stanford University (3.9%), Harvard University (3.8%), Germany's Max Planck Institute (3.8%), the United Kingdom's Medical Research Council (MRC) (3.3%), and the University of Cambridge (2.8%).

The first point that becomes clear is the close correlation between institutions with a high excellence index and those at the centers of leading biotechnology clusters, Pouletty said.

"In other words, it's certainly not a coincidence that Silicon Valley is the number one biotech cluster, with Stanford, Berkley, and UCSF, that the second is Boston, with MIT and Harvard, and the third is southern California with the Salk institute, the University of California, San Diego, and Scripps Research Institute," Pouletty said, "and that the UK hosts the strongest biotech industry in Europe."

"Our conclusion—which we suspected—is that excellent basic research in life sciences is a driving factor in the emergence of a strong biotechnology industry," Pouletty said.

Pouletty stressed that his aim wasn't necessarily to criticize particular institutes for not being up to scratch. "In this study, you're comparing Jaguars with Ferraris and BMWs," he said. "I want to insist that for all these listed, you're talking of high-level research worldwide."

Instead, the main aim was to figure out how Europe could compete better with the United States, which currently outstrips it by a dramatic margin.

Biotech investment in the European Union is only a fraction of that spent in the United States, and the gap is widening, Pouletty said. "Driving Europe toward a better position will certainly involve investing more in basic sciences and also pushing a number of institutes toward a greater level of excellence."

Roberto Solari, chief executive of MRC Technology, the Medical Research Council's technology transfer company, said the translation of basic research into patented products was among the agency's key successes.

"Two of the UK's largest biotech companies, Celltech and Cambridge Antibody Technology, originated as MRC start-ups," Solari told The Scientist. "And in the last 4 years alone, the MRC has earned over £60 million in licensing income and entered into 150 licensing agreements with industry."

Figuring out which factors make an impact on research excellence is up for debate, Pouletty said. They probably include things like modes of evaluation and funding, policies for attracting and hiring academic staff, the competitive environment, and the existence of critical mass of researchers at one location.

Analysis of these kinds of parameters should be the basis for reforms of academic research in France and Europe, Pouletty said in his presentation. "Furthermore, we propose that the Excellence Index used in this study as well as other standardized performance indexes become part of a regular European and international academic research evaluation to monitor trends and help academic institutions progress," he said.

But Anthony van Raan, professor of quantitative studies of science at Leiden University in The Netherlands, and editor of the journal Research Evaluation said developing bibliometric measurements of research value was best left up to experts.

Although van Raan noted that he didn't have full details of the French methodology, he told The Scientist, "In general, it is unwise that people without experience in bibliometric measurements publish 'quick' surveys that should act as a 'simple objective index' for scientific excellence."

"Particularly the use of the ISI journal impact factors is methodologically not very sophisticated, to put it mildly," said van Raan, whose group has produced reports on the subject for the European Commission. "Of course, the top institutes in the US always come first. Their 'power' in scientific input and impact, reinforced by some US bias in the worldwide 'citation traffic,' is such that even with very crude measures, you always find something that looks OK."

For the assessment of European institutes, a much more advanced evaluation of scientific excellence is needed, van Raan said.