Malaga, February 15th. R&D centers, hospitals, academia and small biotechnological enterprises have presented 110 projects to develop new medicines, biomarkers, vaccines, antibodies, gene therapy and drug delivery system to the Farma-Biotech since 2011, the year in which this open initiative of innovation kicked off.

These projects were selected from a total of 466 proposals put forward in the same period, according to the latest data available about this program, which were presented by Farmaindustria in the round table about “Success Stories” held in the framework of the 6th European Forum for Science, Technology and Innovation (“Transfiere”), which was inaugurated this Wednesday in Malaga by His Royal Highness King Felipe VI.

From all selected projects, a total of 42 correspond to new molecules in pre-clinical phases, and another 23 correspond to products in preparation or clinical development phases, and the remaining 5 are already available in the market, as stated by Amelia Martín Uranga, who is responsible for Farmaindustria’s Platform for Innovative Medicines.

As far as therapeutic areas are concerned, oncology, the central nervous system and respiratory, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases are the fields which generate a greater number of research projects for new medicines.

Additionally, during the 15 meetings undertaken throughout these six years in five different cities, 109 entities participated, including 40 pharmaceutical companies, 39 small biotechnological enterprises (from which 23 were spin-off universities or research centers), and 30 hospitals or public research bodies.

Fostering the scientific-technological development

Thanks to the Farma-Biotech Program, which meets the demand of the sector in innovative collaboration, the pharmaceutical industry enjoys the chance to find products in their early development stages in research centers or small startups, whereas the latter, within the framework of agreements reached with pharmaceutical companies, benefit from a boost without which they would face enormous difficulties to lead their project to the more advances clinical research stages.

In conclusion, this Project is about contributing in order so that the scientific-technological developments which are being undertaken in Spain in the field of human health, thanks to the high scientific level of researchers and the quality of facilities, can improve their chances of being appropriately leveraged and used by society.