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Barcelona Plays Host to BIO-Europe Spring® 2010

BIO-Europe Spring moves to Barcelona in March 2010 where Biocat, the BioRegion of Catalonia, promises to surprise business development executives with unexpected opportunities for projects, products and investments.

A long period of investment in Catalonia is today yielding the emergence of a biotechnology capability growing at a rapid rate of 20 new companies per year, and Monteserrat Vendrell, the CEO at Biocat, said “We have a momentum that will not be stopped by any financial crisis, and in fact is being stimulated by this crisis.”

Dr. Vendrell explained that the Spanish government, thanks to the collapse of the country’s real estate market, is now convinced of the need to continue its support of diversifying the nation’s economy and sees the growing strength of Catalonia’s biocluster as a driver for growth.

She added that the Spanish Minister for Science and Innovation, Cristina Garmendia, is the former CEO of Grupo Genetrix, a successful biotechnology company involved in stem cell research. Biocat today can claim 70 companies now working in the biotechnology space with the oldest formed in 2005.

“We have supported the creation of 20 new companies each year since 2005,” said Dr. Vendrell, including university start-ups and pharmaceutical spin-offs averaging from five to ten employees with the largest now having an 80-person staff.

“We are creating a young and emerging sector,” she said. “This is not about some researcher from Denmark who likes the sun moving down to Barcelona. This is about real infrastructure, an English-language scientific community and a momentum growing rapidly in structural biology and genomics that could not have been imagined even five years ago.”

Xavier Testar, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Barcelona, who also serves as a special advisor to the Barcelona Research and Innovation program, is focused on promoting Barcelona’s brand around visible research and innovation activities.

“We are putting Barcelona on the map of biotechnology,” he said.

An example of past investments that are now bearing fruit is the ongoing Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) program, which has attracted 150 advanced researchers with permanent contracts at universities or research centers of their choice in the region.

He said a third of these scientists are foreign born and now located in Catalonia, another third are Catalonian who worked for world-leading organizations and have now returned home, and a third are accomplished researchers from the region who met a requirement of having worked at least four years abroad. “This is an example of the internationalization of our resources for research, which has been the main goal,” he said.

Biocat is not a single cluster but an independent organization bringing together and supporting a number of established research parks throughout the region. “Biocat is the engine driving this action, and we are accelerating it,” said Dr. Testar.

Dr. Vendrell said Biocat works closely with other regional bio-clusters across Europe, and that researchers are also connected with virtual clusters focused on a single area of interest.

“I realize the importance some people have placed on promoting the idea of these virtual, or metaclusters,” she said. “Yet a virtual super cluster is only possible once there is a solid grouping of projects and services in a very clearly located geographical cluster such as we have built.”

“And there are some essential things that are not virtual at all, like our super computing center, the synchrotron, or an animal facility,” she said.

Biocat also offers its researchers and start-up companies a combination of infrastructure, such as incubators within research parks, services for technology transfer and intellectual property, and access to financing.

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