From September 25 to 27, the Madrid Science Park Foundation will attend BioSpain 2018, a European forum for the exchange of knowledge and experiences among biotechnology sector stakeholders, considered by experts as the largest platform for international projection of Spanish biotechnology, which this year will be hosted at the FIBES Exhibition Congress Centre in Seville.
BioSpain is one of the most important biotechnology events in Europe and the fifth in the world by the number of partnering meetings, which is organized entirely by the Spanish Association of Biocompanies (ASEBIO), of which the Madrid Science Park Foundation is an associate member, although on this occasion the organization has the support of the Andalusian Regional Government, through the Idea Agency and its dependent organizations.
In its ninth edition, ASEBIO expects an increase in interest from international investors for BioSpain, especially in Spanish biotechnology projects in the health sector, which facilitate access to capital for biotechnology companies to finance their developments and advance their research.
Similarly, they predict that the meetings will also be the origin of alliances, agreements or negotiations that mobilize the market. In this regard, it is worth noting that, in the survey conducted with attendees after the 2016 event, 84.81% of respondents stated that they identified real business opportunities and the event was rated as good or very good by 76.92%.
In the words of Ion Arocena, -general director of ASEBIO-, in an interview given to Diariofarma, “Among the main topics to be discussed in this edition are the approach to Alzheimer’s, advanced therapies, biobanks, financing programs, the application of artificial intelligence, gene editing, immunotherapy, antibiotic resistance, precision medicine, etc.”
He also points out that “as a novelty, we wanted to boost the presence of researchers, academics and representatives of interface organizations with a special registration policy“. He also adds that “our priority project is BioSpain, where, by the way, we are going to present a very interesting document on success stories in the Spanish biotechnology sector. In addition, we are working on a study that will be published in the coming months, which will show a comparison of R financing models in other countries with respect to what exists in Spain “.
According to data from ASEBIO’s 2017 Annual Report, Madrid is the second autonomous community with the highest number of companies exclusively dedicated to biotechnology with 18.7%, a figure that includes Allinki, Biomedica Molecular Medicine, Life Lengh and Nimgenetics, companies incubated in the FPCM that have also confirmed their presence at the fair.
