Fit for the future

The gate at Klybeckstrasse 141 in Basel, where hundreds of employees were greeted day in and day out by sometimes grumpy staff, has long been deserted; electronic access control has taken over their duties. It is a sign of the times. Klybeck, where color dye production started in the 19th century and chemical and pharmaceutical companies reigned supreme during the last 100 years, is redefining itself after Novartis sold the area to city developers, who aim to attract start-ups and private residents to the place.

One of the recent arrivals to the quarter, next to artists, small manufacturers and biotechs, is the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel, which moved into a seven-story building from the early 1970s. Tamas Szikra, a neuroscientist, who has been an IOB associate since its foundation in 2017 when Botond Roska, a former researcher at the Friedrich Miescher Institute co-founded the organization, was instrumental in helping the IOB settle here some six years ago after the group had initially opened shop on the Novartis Campus. The early days were full of excitement. “We packed a truck full of our laboratory equipment that we had bought from the FMI, and off we went from the Rosental site to the other side of the Rhine,” Szikra said recalling the first move to the Campus. “Soon after, we moved to Klybeck. Their new home became building WKL-420 – WKL stands for Werk Klybeck, or site Klybeck in English –, which originally served as a quality assurance facility for Ciba, including laboratories and archives. When Szikra first visited the building, he was struck by the huge paper archives in addition to the many chemistry laboratories. These were clear signs of a different era. Hot days stuck in a lift The move from the Novartis Campus to the Klybeck site took place in the middle of the pandemic. “The renovation of our new site began at the start of 2019, and the first employees were able to move into floors 3 to 6 in September of the same year,” Szikra said.

Neuroscientist Tamas Szikra was instrumental in getting the IOB up and running.

By that time, the IOB, which started off with only a handful of team members and co-director Botond Roska, already employed around 60 associates and intended to grow further. “We were very happy that we still had some space in reserve at the new location, which we were then able to expand floor by floor,” Szikra explained. However, renovating the former chemistry and archive building to meet the high requirements for biosafety laboratories was challenging. “The ventilation and air conditioning in particular gave my team and me sleepless nights in the first few years,” Szikra said. The tension from that time can still be clearly heard in his voice. The hot summers were a big challenge. “During the first two years after the move, I went to the institute every evening at 10 p.m. in the heatwaves of the summer to open all the windows and then put ice cubes in front of the fans. I was back again at 6 a.m. to close everything in the hope that these measures and the air conditioning system, which was still quite rudimentary at the time, would get us through the hot days,” he detailed.

After the ventilation and cooling systems were fixed, the team struggled with the elevators. “In the initial phase, we had visits from the company fire department practically every week, who had to rescue people from the elevator,” Szikra remembered as he walked me through the building. The elevator was so old that not even the manufacturer’s specialists knew how it could be repaired. After long negotiations with the new owner of the building, Swiss Life, a modern elevator was finally installed.” Modern workplace Such hectic days are long over. Today, associates can enjoy a wonderful vista over the city of Basel from the roof terrace on the seventh floor, which also includes a coffee area and meeting rooms. From there, Tamas Szikra led me through the building, floor by floor. “On the sixth floor, there are workspaces for more than 60 people,” Szikra explained. “They were designed as an open space from the outset. Our employees move between the laboratories on the lower floors and the offices on this floor so that there is always enough space for everyone.”

On the lower floors, the IOB entertains a series of top-notch labs, including bespoke microscopes and analysis instruments that help scientists shed light on how the eye functions in health and in disease. Only the second floor is not yet in use, serving as a kind of reserve for future growth. Here, the original Ciba vibe is still felt. “During the conversion, we kept as much from the originally existing lab arrangement as possible to save costs,” Szikra said, pointing to the cupboards and other furniture. Not perfect, but purposeful While the building is not perfect, Szikra is happy with how the IOB was able to repurpose K-420 and how researchers find what they need for their work. Some of them have even found niches that make them feel like they are in their home office.

Art on the wall.

“What we are particularly proud of is the opportunity to unite all competencies in one building in a small space: from molecular biology to cell biology, to electrophysiology, modeling and translational, and clinical aspects,” Szikra said. “There are not many places in the world where clinicians and biologists, engineers and mathematical modelers work so closely together to develop new therapies for vision loss,” he added. For the city developers of Klybeck, which was the breeding ground for inventions such as Ferrari Red, Voltaren, Gleevec and Araldite, the addition of the IOB bodes well for the future of the district: Innovative spirits, now in biology, are still attracted to this place.