Hurry up! The deadline to submit requests/acceptances to be included in the first round of scheduling is planned on Tuesday 22nd November.
So send now the maximum of meeting requests to your future partners!
If you are not yet registered for BioFIT 2016, do it now! After it will be too late…
Contact us!
Partnering: The 1st round of scheduling is planned on 22nd November Read More »
Although location is important, in my opinion, there is no specific place for innovation. The US is still a good place to generate innovation, but Europe also has key advantages compared to America. We have to highlight that European biotech is growing. The US started long before Europe and we are now seeing the emergence of big companies that may deliver some excellent results. Europe is reaching critical mass, we are just waiting for a few key successes to drive the whole sector. One of the main differences that we need to take into account is the amount of capital injected into the US compared to Europe. There is a huge discrepancy between the two and an issue to be resolved if we are to encourage high potential projects.
One single piece of advice does not exist, however it is important to focus on investors who are specialized in life sciences and establish a track-record of trust with them. This will increase your chances of receiving funding.
I think that European innovation is as progressive as what we are seeing in America. In my opinion, it is a question of mindset – Europe is just as good as the US. We need to start projects and think big immediately. Whether it is in France, Spain, Germany or the UK, think global not local. If you don’t, your project will not reach its full potential. You have to develop your company and expand your business internationally as quickly as possible. This should be done in terms of financing but also in terms of development and distribution of your technology – this is a pre-requisite for success.
This was not part of the original plan but situations evolve. This is normal when you start a business or develop technology – you learn as you go. You don’t have a predefined business model. It has to evolve over time, so it was not something that was planned as such.
That is a good question. I think I can only give a theoretical answer as no two experiences are the same. If the question was “Is it better to start in the US or in Europe?”, I would say that there are different risks in each region. We often think of the US as a final target market for healthcare products but Europe has some additional advantages. One of these is the highly educated and motivated workforce. Europeans tend to stay with companies longer.
The most valuable thing that we can do for start-ups is to help them understand the environment and prevent them from making mistakes. Our value add is advice and mentoring to accelerate good projects. When I find a good team with a promising project, I personally try to push them in the right direction. I am also involved with the European nanomedicine technology platform and we have created a large scale translation hub for Europe. Our goal is to transfer ideas to patients as fast and as efficiently as possible. This has been working well and we are starting to obtain excellent results. We’ve already helped 50 projects and we think that there are at least five that could become unicorns!
Interview with Laurent Levy, CEO of Nanobiotix Read More »
Why are biotech relying on BIOBANQUES?
BIOBANQUES aims to help biotech to accelerate biomarker development and translational research through a lot of services dedicated to human samples and associated data.
How can BIOBANQUES help biotech to build research projects?
BIOBANQUES is involved in establishing public-private partnerships, like H2020 programs. For example, the infrastructure is contributing to the European SPIDIA 4P consortium, which aims to elaborate and disseminate 12 relevant standards dedicated to the diagnostic in the context of personalized medicine.
How much researchers have been relying on BIOBANQUES services?
Since 2014, BIOBANQUES has answered many requests from researchers from both public and private sectors, subsequently helping more than 200 research projects.
www.biobanques.eu/fr/professionnel
We are looking forward to meet you at our stand B6.
The BIOBANQUES Team is happy to meet biotech at BioFIT Read More »
The partnering platform of BioFIT opens tomorrow: Friday 4th November
Get ready to send meeting requests to your future partners!
If you are not yet registered for BioFIT 2016, do it now! After it will be too late…
Partnering opens tomorrow! Read More »
How should TTOs choose between out licensing the IP, creating a spinoff or a contract-based R&D collaborations ?
What translation efforts don’t fit into this classical TTO model ?
How are these decisions taken ?
BioFIT is this year again the occasion to oppose point of views and learn from each other through an international panel !
On December 1st, at 2.30pm, in Van Gogh room, three TTOs, three continents, three different way to apprehend the matter will face each other in a panel, completed by a VC deeply involved in academic affairs:
To spin or not to spin? A session to be discussed December 1st at BioFIT 2016 Read More »
We are very pleased to count Bayer among the Sponsors of BioFIT.
As Bayer, join the BioFIT 2016 Sponsors and get the opportunity to:
Discover all the sponsorship opportunities.
Please contact us to receive a personalised offer that will suit your needs!
Thank you to Bayer for its support to BioFIT 2016 Read More »
Entrepreneurs who are looking to raise capital must be very well prepared to meet with VCs.
This means ensuring that the project is already fundable, having a solid presentation and pitching with the right mindset. How can early-stage companies achieve this? The first and most important step is to deliver their project to business and science experts. Companies should ask the experts to be very critical, as sweet talk is not constructive. Multiplying these meetings with the right people will help identify the project’s real strengths but also its weaknesses, which is key. Advance awareness of these axes of progress will make the project much stronger and credible.
Firstly, it will help to assess if the project is ready to be financed. Secondly, it will allow the early-stage company to build a plan to show that these areas for attention can be addressed and therefore, build its credibility. By definition, the interlocutor should never discover these potential issues at the presentation – they should always be disclosed upfront. The presentation must include and disclose all relevant positive and negative data. It is important to build trust, based on total transparency with the audience.
Crowdfunding is a great source of funding but I don’t think it is adapted to the healthcare sector. Selecting good projects in this particular field requires industry specific expertise. The percentage of failures for non-professionally selected projects is very high as is the size of investment per project.
Seed investment requires a lot of work, expertise and time because we want to put these early stage projects on track for success from the start. However, generally, these projects lack an experienced team at this stage, so VCs have to be more involved and hands on than with more mature projects. For this reason, you cannot just decide to increase the number of VCs investing at the seed stage. It requires a certain organisation that meets these needs. I believe that what we are missing today is a higher number of experienced early stage entrepreneurs with the appropriate drug development expertise that can handle early stage projects. I see this as the major hurdle towards creating an early stage market.
Creating a seed capital market would help translate the right science into well-developed projects. Consequently, this would increase the number of valuable investments and therefore the number of successes in the EU. This would have a positive domino effect on the European biotech ecosystem.
I think the answer to this is any investor with experience in selecting promising science and supporting early stage projects. People expertise, in additional to capital, is the right combination to engage in early stage investment.
What a wonderful Plenary session we have this year!
30th November at 11.30 am, will gather experts from all over Europe to discuss the one-million dollar question which answer is obvious for some, delicate for others, but surely worth having a though on.
“Is Europe competitive enough in life sciences innovation ?”
Preceded by a 30-minute keynote presentation of Peter Gruss, who has been president of the Max Planck Society for over 12 years, and who will discuss “Academic-/biotech-/pharma-cooperations require new models”, the Plenary session will be an-hour long debate followed by a networking lunch to debrief the heated conversation that will be held from 11.30 to 1.00 am.
Check the line-up !
Keynote : “Academic-/biotech-/pharma-cooperations require new models”
Peter Gruss, former President of the Max Planck Society
Panel : “Is Europe competitive enough in life sciences innovation?”
Moderator : John Carroll, Editor EndPoints, USA
Laurent Lévy, CEO of Nanobiotix, FR
Ron Newbold, VP External R&D Innovation for Pfizer Worldwide Research and Developments, USA
Piyush Unalkat, Head of Technology Transfer Investments Innovation & Technology Investments; LUX
Frank Lescure, Managing Partner, Auriga Partners, FR
Johan Cardoen, Managing Director, VIB, Belgium (to be confirmed)
Don’t miss BioFIT Keynote & Plenary session, Amphitheater Pasteur, 30th November, 11.30 am.
BioFIT is the place to find future business partners and accelerate innovation. We have been committed to becoming a meeting point in Europe for tech transfer and for sourcing early-stage innovation and we believe innovation in Life Sciences is crucial. However, it cannot work without proper ways to protect Intellectual Property.
Coming from a joint initiative of Cabinet Beau de Loménie and De Gaulle Fleurance et Associés, BioFIT will consequently feature a workshop entitled “Could your innovations be protected efficiently by tools other than patents ? What about regulatory data protection, trade secret, blockchain & smart contracts?” on the afternoon of November 30th, at 4.30pm, in Matisse room.
For an hour and a half, a panel of experts amongst whom Nicolas Marro, Patent Attorney at Beau de Loménie and Cécile Théard-Jallu, Partner at De Gaulle Fleurance et Associés, will share their expertise.
Are discression, data exclusivity, blockchain & smart contracts playing in the same league as patents? What can we learn from the new European commission directive on trade secrets? What is new for the Life Sciences actors in the EU General Data Protection Regulation? How are the blockchain and smart contracts implemented in IP protection?
These are the questions that the panel will answer in the first part of the Workshop, enabling the audience to better understand these concepts. It is possible to compare the solutions to optimize asset protection, and through the presentation and explanation of these different tools, our experts are committed to bring out best practices in IP protection and raise more subversive questions: Are patents the Holy Grail of IP protection? Are smart contracts tomorrow’s solution for legal directions? Are we facing a war of worlds?
No matter what the answers, it is crucial to understand the roles and complementarities of the weapons available in the legal gear, to protect our products and understand the future of legal protection.
The panel discussion will be followed by an exchange exclusively dedicated to Question & Answer with the floor; during which Nicolas Marro and Cécile Théard-Jallu alongside fellow experts, will have the pleasure to answer your questions and address your concerns.
On the same topic: Don’t miss Cécile Théard-Jallu’s interview on New EU general data protection regulation (contact Manuel Ortiz / Cecile Theard-Jallu bd@dgfla.com +33 (0)1 56 64 15 79)
The IDEA Summit conference programme will dedicate a session to exploring the needs of pharma to advance diabetes research. Tomas Landh, Vice President of Innovation Sourcing at Novo Nordisk answers the question “What is at stake for diabetes innovation and collaborations from a pharma perspective?”
[su_quote](…) we need to think outside the box (…) to make these new collaborations more innovative[/su_quote]
Diabetes is a complex disease with diverse biology. Although primarily focused on the control of blood glucose, the disease is multifaceted affecting many organs such as the pancreas, liver, skeletal muscle, adipose tissue, and vascular tissue.
One could say that the complexity of diabetes makes it difficult for one single company to handle all the challenges of the condition and therefore collaborations are indispensable.
Initially, it was necessary to focus on blood glucose control. Now, excellent treatment options are available for patients. Certain blood glucose lowering treatments are terrific and are backed by very solid data. Clinical outcome studies, focusing on the cardiovascular aspects of long term treatment for diabetic patients at risk of vascular diseases have really set new standards in treatments. Now, we need to concentrate on even more radical innovation, and effectively address other aspects of diabetes, including comorbidities and late stage complications. This will call for collaborations.
Industry innovation will result from external progress in better understanding the disease and its complications. We are looking for innovations which will enable us to control both blood glucose levels and address the many other aspects of diabetes, including innovations in microvascular or macrovascular tissues, improving liver, kidney and eye status. However, we still need drugs to improve insulin sensitivity and treatment of diabetic neuropathy.
From a patient’s perspective, there is still a major unmet need. 50% of patients diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes have access to appropriate treatments, but only half of those who receive access to treatment reach the recommended objectives for blood glucose control. Therefore, in addition to the studies of various related organs, there is a real need for innovation to improve the outcome for patients. To achieve this, numerous additional collaborations in novel pharmacological interventions are possible, but we need to think outside the box about how to make them more innovative. Recent examples include the collaborations with Google Alphabet and IBM Watson.
The session at IDEA Summit is therefore important to convey this message to academic and biotech partners. We cannot continue to act alone, we need to address the complexity of diabetes, especially Type 2 with a holistic and patient centric view.
Obviously, this does not mean that we require numerous partners, two or three actors may be sufficient. The main point is that partnering is key. Whether conveyed by AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk, Sanofi, J&J or Lilly, we all share the same message today. We need to establish collaborations and set the right expectations for our partners. With 250 million diabetic patients worldwide, the financial and social burden is enormous. With excellent treatments available to control blood glucose, we cannot expect society to pay for additional innovation in the same area.
In conclusion, the needs of the whole ecosystem, including patients and society as a whole, from basic science to drug development, must find a voice. Only then will the need for innovation that addresses more than one aspect of the disease be understood. This is in line with the pattern recently observed in clinical trials, which raises the bar for innovation in diabetes.
More information about IDEA Summit: http://www.idea-summit-diabetes.com/
Question to Tomas Landh, Vice President of Innovation Sourcing for Novo Nordisk Read More »
With more than 1,000 international actors from 35+ countries, such as big pharma, emerging and small biotech, diagnostic companies, pre-seed / seed / Series A investors, as well as professionals from tech transfer, academia and research institutions, BioFIT is the leading partnering event in Europe for technology transfer, academia-industry collaborations and early-stage innovation deals in the field of Life Sciences. BioFIT is also the European marketplace for pre-seed, seed and Series A investment rounds in Life Sciences.
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