The biotech sector is a fundamental pillar of the new economic model being pushed in Galicia. What are Bioga’s most significant challenges in this regard?

The biotech sector is an important ally for the solution of both present and future social, environmental and health challenges. Galician biotech companies play a key role in this new economic model, given that they have the capacity, knowledge and capability to develop technology to face these challenges and foster innovation in the most traditional sectors of the Galician economy. However, it is necessary to facilitate public-private collaboration to give the business network the necessary tools to create an ecosystem favourable for the growth and consolidation of the sector, with particular focus on talent attraction and retention, the promotion of entrepreneurship, and value generation through the transference of research results.

In Galicia, the Regional Government´s commitment to biotechnology is evident in their biotech sector consolidation strategy for the period 2021-2025, which aims to make Galicia a point of reference in biotech by promoting its use and application in all economic sectors and encouraging a collaborative ecosystem that favours entrepreneurship and growth and attracts businesses to our community. To contribute to the realization of these challenges, in Bioga we are designing, in conjunction with the Galician Innovation Agency, an activity and service plan for the coming years which will help to improve the competitiveness of organisations in the Galician biotech sector’s value chain.

The strategy you refer to designates biotech as a key area for the growth of the Galician economy. We have talked about the challenges, but what are the needs of the sector’s organisations to achieve this task?

At Bioga we are in constant contact with the ecosystem in order to recognise the needs of the sector over the coming years, which, in a general way, can be summarised in seven points:

1. Prioritise biotech for its ability for respond to a wide range of health or environmental challenges and emergencies.
2. Assimilate the entire sector so it can be represented as a whole, including key sectors in Galicia and recognising the biotech sector as a unifying element for the growth of business around it.
3. Adapt to the needs of digitalisation and to new technologies to improve the sector’s capacity.
4. Facilitate links with complementary sectors to generate disruptive solutions.
5. Become responsible and sustainable in order to contribute to the 2030 Agenda and to the Sustainable Development Goals, ensuring that there is no discrimination between different strategic lines with a diverse and inclusive ecosystem.
6. Encourage the implementation of highly specialized, landmark private venture capital funds in the community for the analysis of investment operations.
7. International expansion as a path to growth for biotech companies.

Based on the strategic plan for the next five years, we will work around five key points with the objective of covering all of the sector’s needs: talent and human capital; transference of results, commercialisation and internationalisation; mobilisation and attraction of capital; collaborative ecosystems; status and dissemination of the bioregion.

The Galicia Business Office, which reports to the General Vice-Secretariat for Business Support, promotes the attraction and retention of talent by encouraging companies to establish themselves in the Galician region. Do you think this resource helps to strengthen the synergy between public administration and business networks?

Without a doubt promoting the establishment of biotech companies in Galicia is a key aspect for the consolidation of the sector, and it also contributes to talent attraction and retention. With this goal in mind, we must continue to focus on public-private collaboration and encourage interaction between the business network and public administration, with the aim of communicating businesses’ needs and designing the instruments and tools necessary to strengthen the business network. Bioga plays a key role as an intermediary in this sense, given that it is unifying and has the capacity to detect joint needs and interact with administrations.

Where do you think the Galician biotech sector finds itself after the boost it received during the Covid-19 pandemic?

Thanks to the collaborative and synergetic work of the whole ecosystem in recent years, and with the support of the regional Government through the Biotech Promotion Strategy 2016-2020, the sector finds itself in an advantageous leading position in the national and international field. Galicia is one of the most dynamic regions of Spain and is the second most bio-entrepreneurial bioregion nationally with around a 10% annual growth in recent years. With a business ecosystem formed of 130 businesses which produce a 450 million euros turnover and employ more than 2000 people, the sector is moving from strength to strength. Bioga has grown on par with the sector and is positioned as one of the foremost national clusters uniting more than 80 organisations from the entire value chain of the sector.

What place do the circular economy and sustainability occupy among priority areas of action in the sector like marine resources; agriculture and farming; forestry; health food and active ageing; pharmaceutical and vaccine production, and even the new technologies for personalized medicine? 

The current economic model is in a transformation phase in order to confront the main socioeconomic challenges we are facing. The current system must evolve into a new model which prioritises efficiency, sustainability and social impact, given that biological resources are an essential part of our economy and it is necessary to guarantee the sustainability of renewable biomaterials.

Biotechnology contributes to the design, development and implementation of solutions to make the circular economy a reality. As a result, the environmental impact of economic activities is reduced through environmental recovery, the minimization of energy consumption or waste recovery. This way, the circular economy, sustainability and bioenergy can act as a turning point for the rest of the priority subsectors in our community and even for other strategic business networks in Galicia. Biotechnology is considered a facilitating technology for the circular economy, the minimization of environmental impact and as a solution to the energy demands of our society.