One of the few things we can be certain of is that the year 2009 will be one of uncertainties. The reduction in availability of VC and seed money in 2009 shows practically no doubt. In such a context, emerging and young biotech companies must make critical decisions to optimize their expenses, rethink options as whether to perform internally or outsource part of their expertises and give new thought to defining their core projects and priorities. This difficult year did however open up opportunities. Public funding schemes budgets will most probably remain stable, and thus offer solutions in terms of cash flow. The public policies that target innovation will be increasingly more directed toward public-private partnerships. It also appears to be ever more likely that the breakdown between equity and loans will change durably. All this is creating a need for emerging companies to re-engineer their business model and obtain cash services and partnership deals rather than being backed totally by equity.

One of the few things we can be certain of is that the year 2009 will be one of uncertainties. The reduction in availability of VC and seed money in 2009 shows practically no doubt. In such a context, emerging and young biotech companies must make critical decisions to optimize their expenses, rethink options as whether to perform internally or outsource part of their expertises and give new thought to defining their core projects and priorities. This difficult year did however open up opportunities. Public funding schemes budgets will most probably remain stable, and thus offer solutions in terms of cash flow. The public policies that target innovation will be increasingly more directed toward public-private partnerships. It also appears to be ever more likely that the breakdown between equity and loans will change durably. All this is creating a need for emerging companies to re-engineer their business model and obtain cash services and partnership deals rather than being backed totally by equity.

The aim of this track is to emphasize the fruitful and pragmatic inter-cluster partnerships and stress the impact these partnerships have in terms of therapeutic or enabling innovations, in terms of creation of ambitious collaborative programmes carried out by the clusters’ respective members or in terms of useful innovative tools these clusters propose to their members. This track will focus on innovations and achievements stemming from European bioclusters. Different research areas (cancer, immunotherapy, bioproduction, pharmaceutical chemistry…) will be dealt with by scientists and CSOs originating from different clusters.
Through testimonials, the different members of clusters will speak about their successes and emblematic projects. In this track, and through those different illustrations, the aim is to show the importance of cluster’s management and teams in the construction of a knowledge-based bioeconomy in Europe. Our choice in this track is to be able to hear what entities benefiting from the cluster process say i.e. SMEs, academic researchers taking part in the life of their respective cluster.