This morning, the directors of each platform presented a summary of their activity during the past year, after which their invited speakers gave talks. This year, NanoMedSpain has invited Rashid Bashir, Executive Associate Dean and Chief Diversity Officer at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, whose speech was entitled “BioMEMS and Biomedical Micro and Nanotechnology: from Lab-on-Chip to Printing Cellular machines”.
In this presentation of the activity of NanoMedSpain, Josep Samitier, coordinator of the platform and Director of IBEC, stressed the importance of public investment in research and innovation. “The investment in public research centers of ten years ago is pushing today’s technology transfer,” he said. “With the recent cuts in national funding, we may be dampening future technological development.” Nevertheless, he highlighted that biomedical research is a strongly innovative and agile sector, able to cope with changes and adapt to them with ease.
Ángel Lanuza, Coordinator of the National Platform on Health Technology, pointed out that a better investment strategy could stem from the systematic quantification of value (products, patents, job positions) and impact generated by previous investments.
All partners agreed on the urge for better legislation to promote research and innovation. In line with one of the main topics of the conference, big data, a special mention was made of pursuing data privacy policies favoring biomedical research in hospitals and research centers. “We should create a general database from patients not only linked to particular tests,” commented Ferran Sanz of the Innovative Medicines platform.
“The ultimate goal is to improve our population’s health. We may now have some data that could potentially benefit our society in the future, so we must regulate the storage of clinical data from patients whilst protecting their right to privacy,” added Ion Arocena, general director of ASEBIO.
