Reconnecting with Europe
After a few years of uncertainty over the UK’s involvement in Horizon Europe, IBioIC has restarted building connections and collaborations with our European colleagues.
Spain has a fast-growing biotechnology sector and with >1000 biotech businesses and GVA of €11 billion - broadly equivalent to the UK in terms of activity and impact. Spanish biotech is predominantly based around medicine and healthcare, but there is a steadily growing presence from agritech and industrial biotech (>20% of businesses). With support from our Scottish Development International colleague Raquel Largo Martinez, based in Madrid, IBioIC’s Dr Liz Fletcher and Caroline Kewney represented Scotland at BioSpain in Barcelona in July.
With over 2000 delegates, 5000 1-2-1 bio partnering meetings, it is currently the 3rd largest biotech conference in Europe. The 2-day event was a great opportunity to better understand the biotech landscape in Spain and to start to map out where Scotland and Spain might best cooperate and collaborate going forward. IBioIC has subsequently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Bioga, a Galician biotech networking organisation, and Liz recently participated in an online International Partnering Event organised by Bioga and connecting with other biotech networks across Spain and beyond.
This year the European Federation of Industrial Biotech (EFIB) annual conference was held in Rotterdam. Attended by over 375 delegates, the event focused on building a competitive bioeconomy for a sustainable future, looking specifically at green jobs, circular bio-based solutions for products and food, sourcing materials locally, and building strong supply chains. Caroline attended on behalf of IBioIC and attended one of the pre-conference summits on the potential for biomanufacturing in plants, streamlining GMP production both upstream and downstream, and considering the challenges for scale-up, funding and regulatory legislation. A key message was that in general Europe is lagging behind the US and needs to work collaboratively across member states to ease the innovation journey, balancing risk and caution, to enable novel products such as cultured meat, (currently only available in Singapore and US) to come to the European market.
Both conferences provided a great opportunity to understand the landscape across Europe, including funding opportunities. Start-up companies, regulators, investors, government, and established companies participated in panel discussions with lively debates on legislation, sustainability, finance and what’s next for European biotechnology, alongside plenty opportunity for networking and 1-2-1 partnering.
IBioIC is keeping abreast of European funding opportunities and can offer support in seeking collaborators across Europe. Indeed, IBioIC was recently invited to participate in a bid to be part of a consortium bid for a European Circular Economy Innovation Valley. This will be yet another opportunity to build stronger links with our European friends.