The final presentations of the third edition of MIT-Portugal Bio-innovation teams (BioTeams) took place July 7, 2010, in a public session within the Ciência 2010 Program in Lisbon. BioTeams is a mandatory course of the advanced program in Bioengineering Systems of the MIT Portugal Program, with very particular characteristics. During a full semester the students are given real technologies, selected from Portuguese labs, and are asked to engage in a search to evaluate and exploit their market potential. As real projects, the BioTeams ideas and assumptions have to be validated through contacts with worldwide professionals and other stakeholders. This makes the interview process very intense and provides the students with a sound perception of the business reality. These contacts take place globally, and the students have the opportunity to develop their own networks that include Portuguese companies, such as MIT-Portugal Program affiliates and others. During the semester, the students visited several entities, including technological parks such as BioCant, Spinpark, CITEVE and CENTI, and companies such as Biotempo, Stremmaters and GenIBet. At the final presentations, Pedro Pissarra (Biotecnol) and Raquel Fortunato (GenIbet) presented their business experiences and guests from different business fields were invited to discuss the projects with the students.  BioTeams student project team members at Ciência 2010 The projects developed in this edition were diverse including the use of new biomaterials, development of new bioprocesses and state of the art bioinformatics systems. The technologies proposed for the BioTeams were developed at laboratories from University of Minho, Universidade Nova Lisbon (ITQB and FCT) and Instituto Superior Técnico.  Recommended actions for 2010 BioTeams projects As is usual practice in the BioTeams presentations, a group of professionals was invited to comment on the different projects, not only from the point of view of the technological impact and market opportunity, but also to give inputs on the communication strategy, and more importantly on the final recommendation. These recommendations are transmitted to the principal investigators (PIs) and universities from which arose the different technologies, with the aim of directing the PIs to appropriate exploitation of their discoveries or to re-direct their research. The main recommendation directs the PIs towards one of these options:
(a) assess the potential for a new technological based start up
(b) try to license their technology to a existing company, or
(c) make further refinements in the lab before commercialization is attempted To support the idea of launching a company, another alternative recommendation can be to submit these projects to further entrepreneurial programs or competitions such as the IEI-MIT Portugal Technology Ventures Initiative, Start Prize, Cohitec, or BES innovation. |
