An advanced therapy company against lethal diseases, Viralgen, has propelled San Sebastián to become the city with the greatest weight in R&D in Spain.
Madrid native Javier García Cogorro arrived in San Sebastián in late 2017 with only a handful of people and a bold idea: to establish a factory producing modified viruses, used to introduce replacement DNA into patients with severe genetic diseases, aiming to cure them with a single, permanent treatment. This seemingly quixotic project, called Viralgen, now employs 435 people and has propelled San Sebastián to be the city with the highest proportional R&D weight in Spain, according to data from the Cotec Foundation. Viralgen uses human cells, multiplied from an embryo’s kidney, to cultivate sophisticated viruses sold for experimental gene therapy trials. The treatments offer hope for patients like Candela, a six-year-old girl with a rare disease called infantile Parkinson’s, and Alberto, a four-year-old boy from Seville with spastic paraplegia 50, a neurodegenerative disorder that slowly leads to paralysis. In 2020, German giant Bayer purchased Viralgen for $4 billion, with García Cogorro continuing as chairman of the board. Viralgen has become a symbol of the transformation of the Basque Country, which has consistently invested in R&D, now reaching 2.32% of its GDP, five hundredths more than the European average and well above the Spanish total of 1.44%.
However, the rapid growth of the company poses challenges, especially in finding enough qualified workers. García Cogorro applauds the Basque public system of Dual Vocational Training, which quickly designed a gene therapy specialization program tailored to Viralgen. After training, students directly join the company. This has had a visible effect on statistics, with 2.3% of social security affiliates in San Sebastián working in R&D companies, compared to 1.3% in Barcelona, 0.9% in Madrid, and 0.8% in Seville. García Cogorro and his partners chose San Sebastián for its proximity to France, home to leading gene therapy experts, but acknowledges the advantages of being in the Basque Country. The region offers tax incentives for companies investing in R&D, a high quality of life, and the capacity for self–government to deploy large R&D programs. Looking ahead, García Cogorro sees biosciences and quantum technology as key strategic areas and is eager to apply the power of new quantum computers to intractable bioscience problems. His investment fund recently led a €25 million funding round for Multiverse Computing, another emerging San Sebastián company that is the largest quantum software company in the European Union. San Sebastián will also host the world’s sixth IBM quantum supercomputer, according to an agreement signed a year ago between the American company and the Ikerbasque Foundation, a Basque government initiative launched in 2007 to attract global talent. Despite these advances, challenges remain, including low birth rates and a complex language that can deter newcomers. García Cogorro suggests relaxing linguistic policies to facilitate the arrival of talent from outside the Basque Country.
