Tokyo (SCCIJ)—About 50 members and guests of the SCCIJ attended the April luncheon with speaker Prof. Dr. Christian Schwarzenegger, Vice President of Faculty Affairs and Scientific Information of the University of Zurich. His speech focused on two areas: on the one hand he presented the University of Zurich’s start-up ecosystem that has been built up in the last 15 years, and on the other hand he explained the efforts to establish strong research collaborations between Switzerland and Japan. We summarize his speech in a Q&A format.
In the past, universities were places for teaching and research. Is this traditional model still valid?
Prof. Christian Schwarzenegger: Today, the university also functions as an innovation engine and idea accelerator to foster academic and entrepreneurial development and create spin-offs. Universities now need and want to produce innovation, commercialize ideas, and create business opportunities. The University of Zurich has built such an ecosystem around the UZ Innovation Hub, covering the four action areas of digital innovation, healthy longevity, life sciences, and space and aviation.
What were you able to achieve with this setup so far?
C.S.: We are building an entrepreneurial mindset with courses for Bachelor, Master, and PhD students and business experts and entrepreneurs as teachers. We empower venture creators, resulting already in 76 invention disclosures, 31 patent applications, and eight new spin-offs. We give innovation grants and award entrepreneur fellowships to support starting a company based on UZH research. The idea is to promote embryonic ideas into something more grown-up with a commercial potential. Altogether, researchers incorporated 19 start-ups with a 5-year survival rate of 95%. Since 1999, the university has sponsored 161 companies. That number is impressive for a comprehensive university, but lower than that of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
Can you give an example of one of these successful start-ups?
C.S.: The young company Ontrack Biomedical has developed an innovative method to generate monoclonal antibodies for in-vitro diagnostics. The start-up’s urine test detects markers of prostate cancer at an early stage. Patients with elevated levels of a prostate-specific antigen can use the test to decide whether to undergo an intrusive prostate biopsy or not. This approach reduces the number of unnecessary prostate biopsies performed on men by 50% and is relevant for roughly 40 million men per year.
Let us talk about collaborations between Switzerland and Japan at the university level. Why do you describe them as promising?
C.S.: Japan and Switzerland are both very innovative countries and similar in many ways. We have a similar university system (with strong public involvement), pre-existing bottom-up research collaborations at a reasonable level (Switzerland is among the 10 most important research partners of Japan), an overlap in many research areas (life sciences, technology, medicine, mobility, and healthy aging), both countries have research-intensive companies and put high priority on sustainability and innovation, and enjoy a stable political system. Plus: They have a longstanding friendship.
The University of Zurich has ten academic partnerships in Japan, the most important one with Kyoto University. What are the fruits of this collaboration?
C.S.: One result is that in the period between 2014 and 2023, the number of co-authored research publications has been steadily increasing, but more importantly, these publications reach a much higher world-wide visibility. Kyoto-Zurich collaborations are cited 10-times more than average. In short: If you put excellect researchers in both universities together, you will get much more impactful results. Our flagship collaboration is between the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (Kyoto), founded by Nobel Prize recipient Shinya Yamanaka, and the Institute for Regenerative Medicine Collaboration (Zurich). Since signing a strategic partnership in 2020, we have had a constant flow of researchers between the two institutes. Stem cell therapies are the future of treatment in personalized medicine; six applications are already known. Therefore, we are very happy about the progress of this collaboration.
Where do you see the next challenges for the scientific and medical collaboration between Japan and Switzerland?
C.S.: One challenge is the vast amount of data required for training an AI algorithm. The current data protection ideas stem from the analog age and are slowing down these training efforts. An alternative could be patient data donation. Another idea is a trusted partnership in sharing training data for medical image and cancer analysis. For example, we could share such data with Japanese partners to speed up the personalization of medicine.
Some companies are working on digital twins of organs and humans for vaccine and other medical tests. Could this be another area of Swiss-Japanese cooperation?
C.S.: Indeed, within our cooperation with the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application in Kyoto, stem cells have a huge potential for testing medicine, for example, testing it directly on induced heart cells that are developed from stem cells of a patient. Such tests are ongoing in Japan already. Also, the next stage in AI development is the use of agents. With the help of AI, you create a group of several thousand “people clones” with 10 to 15 specific social or medical characteristics. Then, you can run surveys or tests among this group because AI can imitate human behavior and characteristics by 80-85%.
Everybody is talking about artificial intelligence. How is the development impacting the field of medicine at the University of Zurich?
C.S.: We define four levels of AI literacy: Using, leveraging, developing, and regulating. “In the future, rather than working forward from questions posed by humans, humanity confronts answers provided by AI to questions that no human ever asked,” write Henry A. Kissinger, Craig Mundie, and Eric Schmid in their book “Genesis” (London 2024). The rise of AI will transform universities dramatically in the next ten years. For example, you need enough patient data to run algorithms to find new drugs, molecules, and to analyze image data in the medical field. At the LOOP Zurich, we have already built a showcase how to use research and clinical data for AI training.
The performance of Generative AI tempts students and researchers to use ChatGPT and other tools without acknowledging it. What is the University of Zurich doing about this behavior?
C.S.: We foster and emphasize a complete culture of scientific integrity. We teach the ethical principles of scientific research, we take control measures like stopping online exams and checking texts whether they were written by AI. But most importantly, the students and researchers must behave in the appropriate ethical way. We should also look at the positive impact. For example, the complex Japanese language tends to marginalize scientists from Japan, but due to AI translations, foreign researchers can access Japanese research more easily and vice versa.
About the speaker
Prof. Dr. Christian Schwarzenegger studied at the University of Zurich and earned his doctorate in 1992. From 1994 to 1999, he was an Assistant Professor at two universities in Japan. Since 1999, Schwarzenegger has held a Chair in Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure Law, and Criminology at UZH. He was Dean of the Faculty of Law (2010–2014) and is Vice President of the University of Zurich since 2014. In 2025, the Japanese government awarded him the prestigious Order of the Rising Sun for his contributions to academic exchange and mutual understanding between Japan and Switzerland.
Text and pictures: Martin Fritz for SCCIJ
