Marco Baccanti at Wired Health: "More complete and competitive with Enea Tech and Biomedical"

Marco Baccanti at Wired Health

Engines on for Enea Tech and Biomedical, the foundation supervised by the Ministry of Economic Development that will promote and bring to the market projects related to life sciences. Initial allocation: € 750 million. For three weeks the general manager has been Marco Baccanti, who has returned to Italy after years abroad to lead the change. "The goal is to develop life sciences in Italy, to achieve a more complete and competitive supply chain, with the ability to attract investments and improve technology transfer capacity, generating economic value from scientific research", said Baccanti speaking at sportsgaming. .win Health 20220.

Enea Tech and Biomedical “it will not be an organization aimed at financing scientific research, but there will always be a focus on the market. The models we are inspired by are international ones: specialized authorities on the economic development of research projects. The levers - explains Baccanti - are always the right policies and public money that must be exploited to catalyze processes that would not take place or would take place slower than necessary ”.

Focus, of course, on startups and innovative small-medium enterprises which, however, are only one area on which Enea Tech and Biomedical will move. “Startups and SMEs are sustainable and a harbinger of development, we need innovation that satisfies a need. The second pillar is to help the competitiveness of existing companies; the third lever is to attract companies from outside to complete the supply chain where it is not possible to do so with startups and more mature companies. We must ensure that growth comes organically and that all projects are credible from an economic point of view ”, highlights Baccanti.

The focus is in fact entirely on the "final objectives" of the foundation controlled by the Mise: "To give back a more competitive country and to ensure that the biotech supply chain is more complete". This is why we want to "make sure that new companies can fill the gaps and at the same time we want to make existing companies stronger". Fortunately, this is not an easy task: "Italy - Baccanti recalls - is still the largest exporter of pharmaceutical products in Europe. An excellence recognized abroad and which must be defended ".

Marco Baccanti dg of Enea Tech Biomedical (photo: Franco Russo)

Franco Russo In this very first period of work, the management of Enea Tech and Biomedical is in a "maieutic phase: we have taken short period to do full immersion, contact stakeholders and identify critical developments on which we need to be more attentive. Over the next two months - he explains - we hope to have clarity on the critical factors and decide which operational activities we can implement ".

"Bridging the gap in technology transfer" An "all-Italian" weakness is linked to technology transfer, this is the ability to bring to the market highly technological solutions developed in academic research centers: "If we go to compare the quality of the scientific literature and how much economic value can be created we note that there is a considerable gap compared to other OECD member countries similar to us. Not to mention tech transfer champions such as the US or Israel… ”. And this is also because the system, Baccanti points out, “is slower to implement new medical developments in policies and this generates a decline in competitiveness”.

A push to change comes precisely Covid-19 from which “we have learned many things: health has become a priority. The pandemic has focused on gaps in the supply chain, such as being able to produce what was no longer produced. A concept - underlines the CEO - that goes well with a process of international geopolitical repolarization that pushes us to see the supply chains in a more modern way ”. Hence the foundation's mission which is also to "manage the complexity of the supply chain, identifying and completing the gaps".