Science + Partners: Five Research Projects for Twelve Companies

The first edition of the Science + Partners meeting organized by the Bosch i Gimpera Foundation brought together different experts from the business world and five researchers of the University of Barcelona and its affiliated institutes who work in the early stages of health research projects. For 30 minutes, the researchers presented their innovations and took questions and comments from the experts—"What is the business value of your product?", "Why is it better than that of the competition?." This experience was totally geared towards giving a more commercial focus to their projects and creating a much more valuable proposal with a view to licensing a patent to a third party or creating a spin-off. "One of the most interesting aspects has been the opportunity to obtain information about what issues about the patent interest investors the most," says Dr. Albert Prats, leader of the research group on Applied, Surgical, and Virtual Anatomy.

This first edition of Science + Partners revolved around the projects of five research groups from the UB, the IDIBAPS, and the IRB: Hepatic Hemodynamics and Portal Hypertension, with the Exoliver project; Applied, Surgical, and Virtual Anatomy presented their SPS-L Kit; Pluripotency Laboratory, with their research on stem cell technology; Therapeutic Peptides and their project on New Antimicrobial Compounds; and Design, Synthesis and Structure of Peptides and Proteins that presented their Gate2Brain project. According to Dr. Clara Campàs, Director of Strategy and Development of Kern Pharma—who attended the conference as a partner—these projects "are not only admirably solid both technically and scientifically speaking, but also focus on unresolved medical needs. "

The partners invited to the conference formed a varied committee of experts in the field of health technologies: Albert Cot, executive advisor of Inveniam Group; Mª Isabel Berges, CFO of Spherium Biomed; Antonio Gómez, research liaison of Johnson & Johnson; Isabel Amat, head of innovation at Biotech; Sara Secall, director of investment at Inveready Biotech II; Laia Crespo, director of investment at Ysios Capital; Lluis Pareras, director of Healthequity; Ramon Bosser, COO of Spherium; Àlex Casta of Caixa Capital Risk; Daniel Oliver and Jordi Riules, of Capital Cell, and Andrés G. Fernández, director of Ferrer Advanced Biotherapeutics. The latter described the initiative of the FBG as "excellent," because it "facilitates that the academic research in biomedicine has a real impact on the patient."

The Bosch i Gimpera is already working on a second edition of Science + Partners after the positive feedback of participants, as Dr. Francesc Rabanal, project leader of New Antimicrobial Compounds, who expressed his satisfaction with these words: "It was a great opportunity to present ourselves to companies in the field, and we believe that our project of new antibiotics has aroused the interest of several of those companies."