CATALONIA AND SIX EUROPEAN REGIONS SHARE GOOD PRACTISES IN BIOTECHNOLOGY TRANSFER

The ten organizations working on the ETTBio project funded by the European Union with €2.3 millions, including Biocat and the CRG, met in Barcelona to specify collaborations.

The ten partners of ETTBio (Effective Technology Transfer in Biotechnology), one of the main projects under the EU’s Innovation and Knowledge Economy program —in which Biocat and the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) are representing Catalonia— chose Barcelona for the third work session held from 13 to 15 March, coinciding with the top European partnering congress, BIO-Europe Spring.

The ETTBio project, with a budget of €2.3 millions through 2014, will work to identify and exchange good practices for technology transfer in biotechnology among seven European regions and cities.

After the meeting in London last December, the session in Barcelona served to share the analysis reports on technology transfer from each region in order to find collaboration opportunities. Various partners on the project, like the Imperial College Business School of London, Vrije Universiteit (Brussels), the Ostrava Regional Development Agency (Moravia-Silesia, Czech Republic) and the cities of Tartu (southern Estonia), Warsaw (Poland) and Dresden (Saxony, Germany) expressed interest in the model used by Biocat, as the body that has helped consolidate and dynamize the BioRegion of Catalonia since 2006, and in the programs and activities carried out by the CRG’s Technology Transfer Office (TTO) as an example of effective transfer of results from basic science to industry.

They were also interested in the results obtained through five years of the BioEmprenedorXXI program promoted by "la Caixa", Barcelona Activa and Biocat, an initiative geared towards researchers with business ideas that want to start up a company in the life sciences, which has supported 141 projects, including success stories like STAT-Diagnostica, Intelligent Pharma, VCN Biosciences, iMicroQ, qGenomics, Phyture Biotech, Transbiomed, XCelia, and Minoryx Therapeutics, among others.

Biocat and the CRG "were attracted by the technology-transfer, funding, incubation and entrepreneurial-support models of Imperial College and the Vrije Universiteit, the public funding models of Ostrava, and the IP management and spin-off models of Dresden, as all of these are well-consolidated and have shown interesting results that could be applied in our area,” agreed Carlos Lurigados, head of Entrepreneurship and Business Growth for Biocat, and Xavier Rúbies, head of Technology Transfer at the CRG.

During their stay in Barcelona, the European partners of Biocat and the CRG visited two scientific facilities of international excellence in the life sciences: the CRG —located in the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park— and the Barcelona Science Park, where they held a meeting with the executive team of the Bosch i Gimpera Foundation, which does noteworthy work to detect research projects with commercial potential at the University of Barcelona.

The next meeting of ETTBio will be held in mid-September in Warsaw to share details of the models developed so each region can incorporate and adapt them to their own specific condition.