“Development need: The coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated the importance of medical biotechnology in the efforts to produce a vaccine. Turkey’s yearly investments in innovative drug R&D is significantly lower than the world average (global investments in innovative drug R&D is USD 120 bl/y, Turkey’s share is only USD 60 mil/y representing only 0.039% of global R&D). (8) ”

Policy priority: Medicine and Medical Devices are among the priority sectors highlighted by the 11th Development Plan. The 2020 Presidential Program highlights biotechnological drugs as a priority area in healthcare.The 2019-2023 Strategic Plan of the Ministry of Health stresses the importance of domestic medicine production and R&D efforts.

Gender inequalities and marginalization issues: 60% of healthcare workers in Turkey are women. (15) There is no official data providing a gender-based breakdown of the job categories in the healthcare sector. There are 1.83 doctors per 1000 people in Turkey (16), this is below the OECD average of 3.4.(17) There are currently 19.05 hospital beds per one million people in the country. (16) Although the regional breakdown of these indicators are not provided, rural and remote areas have an unequal access to health facilities and personnel.

“Investment opportunities: Existing biotechnology clusters in Izmir under the Izmir Biotech Cluster Initiative: they offer a biotech startup end-to-end product development as well as testing and certification (6)(7). Moreover, biotechnology drug production is a priority investment area for the country, and therefore is eligible for multiple government investment incentive programs. ”

“Key bottlenecks: Entry barriers include the few API manufacturers in operation, high costs of initial investment, the ambiguity in the regulatory approval processes of locally produced biosimilars and the difficulty of finding trained scientists for biosimilar/biotech production (6)”