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Innovation 8 medicine

Poland idea for a scientist?Werner Deichmann, Juan Product manager at Orenore Polska

I WORK IN O R E N O R E , an investmentfund company which possess a Portfolio with projects of the biotechnol-ogy and pharmaceutical areas apartfrom other areas like renewable energy and multimedia. The proper expan-sion of the portfolio reuires very ac-curate studies of the projects that ourmanagement n n d s interesting.

Many of my duties are related toth e evaluation, from the IntellectualProperty and the marketability pointsof view of projects that always seemto be extremely promising and revo-lutionary when they are presented tous, and they are indeed, but often moreas scientific advances t h a n as possi-ble products that can solve, withoutinvesting decades on investigation, ac u r r e n t problem or necessity.

In my experience I have becomeconvinced that there is no lack of greatminds in Poland. I have met ma nybright scientists during these yearsand I can see that many go to the best

universities abroad, where th ey meetth e world leaders in their fields andwork in the best labo ratories but, afte r a few years, many of t h e m comeback to Poland.

This is surprising if one takes int oa c c o u n t that they come back to acountry w here a public fund investm e n t in R&D (Research an d Developm e n t ) has never been higher t h a n0.55% of the GDP, and the plans ofreaching 1.9% before 2020 (the averagein EU is 2%) are perceived wit h g eneral scepticism. In my opinion theycome back to nn d something that isvery rare and one of the most valua-ble "invisible assets" of the Polish so-ciety - the respect given to those be-longing to the "inteligencja ," a wordthat refers to th e social class composedof people with the highest educationand those whose work contribute toth e world of culture.

M o r e surprising still is why somany bright sc ientists do not seem to

be having an effect in the numb er ofpatents issued in Poland.

On January 17-18, the Nencki Instit u t e , an institution at the avant-gardeof life sciences in Poland, organized aSeries of conferences, with the title of"Managing Innovation" on the sub-ject of how the innovations comingfrom the academia can be convertedinto commercial products.

Apart from my opinions, 1 will citesome of those expres sed by Polish scientists at that conference and oth-ers belonging to a conversation that Imaintained with Andrzej Bialkowski-Miler, an analyst and manag er in theBio Tech Med Cluster Mazovia (BTM)where he is responsible for managem e n t of scientific projects both att h e pre - and post-capital investmentstage, as well as coaching and sup-porting a group of technology brokers.

In order to underst and why the science and the industrial worlds are sofar apart in Poland it is necessary firstto understand how they see each other.

A perception that I had in Spain,wher e I studied Biology and I havec o n h r m e d in Poland is that the idea

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for a scientist is to develop his or hercareer in the University and achievegreat discoveries that will widen andgive deeper detail to human knowledge. That objective is something tha tca n be done only with enough govern-ment ftnancing but that idea comesfrom other times, when the practiceof science was more related to phi-losophy than to a dynamically devel-oping world in which the applicationof knowledge is key for the success ofany economy. Nowadays it shouldn'tbe the only objective. But as muchas the scientist wants to create newknowledge, acuire respect in theircommunity and leave their mark forth e futur what the industry wantsis to make money as much and as fastas possible, to grow and to conquermarkets. It is like if both worlds notonly spoke different languages buthad evolved eompletely different cul-tures. And the conseuence that I sawin Spain and now in Poland is that towork for the Industry is seen as ana b a n d o nm e n t of the real objec tivesof the scientist, therefore it is a des-tiny for those who are less successfulin the academic circles.

The government should then pricebetween the scientists the ir efforts toapproach the industry.

Andrzej Bialkowski-Miler an-swered to that observation that thegovernment is doing a lot to promotescience being commercialised. Theinstitutes get more financial supportwhen they develop a higher numberof industrial applications. The problem that he sees with the incentivesis that as much as the director s of sci-en t i h c institutes are evaluated by theindustrial applications developed byth e scientists working in the instit u t e , those scientists are evaluatedaccording to purely academic merits.That has much more to do with basiescience than with its possible applicat ions. Since the continuity of the scientists in their job depends on theirevaluation, the illusive financial in-centives related to the commercial-isation of scientiftc results are sim-ply not strong enough for a majorityof rese arc hers and , to be effective,must be combined with other argu-ment s , of both material and utilitar-ian character.

The experie nce in USA has shownt h a t what can most influence the

a t t i t ude of the scientists towards industry is to have models of success.This is difficult to happen nowadays inPoland because the risk of failure related to the establishment of a start-upis always high and in the case of success most of the economical gains goto the University.

One possible solution to the problem, not excluding any other options,might be to include patents to the eval-uation of individual scientists.

In general it is easy to see that inPoland there is a clear lack of interestof the Polish medical or pharmaceu-tical Companies in long-term investmen t s , necessary for R&D projectsreaching the phase of POC (Proof ofConcept). It is much easier to ftnd Companies willing to invest in a scientiftcproject if one looks in Germany, Eng-land or the US where there are also scientists with many years of experiencein Industry.

O n that subject AndrzejBialkowski-Miler thin ks that the mostprobable reason why it is difficult toftnd Polish industries interested inR&D is because Poland is a transform-ing economy and still its main com-petitive advan tage on a global ma rket is pure price; for that reason it ischeaper to produce what others in-vent than to risk the investors' money in long and risky projects.

I have heard that opinion in Spainalso and when the economy was at itsbest. It seems to me that the na tu r ofbusiness is to make money easily andwhen that opportunity appears theyalways will try that way before the difficult. It is true also th at in a matureconomy ther e is place for Companieswith enough resources to invest in afutur that looks even decades aheadand Poland is now creating the infra-structures that will make the appear-ance ofsuch Companies possible.

A very powerful instrument thatt h e Polish government possess topromote the establishment of relations between science and Industry ar e the EU funds de dicated toNCBiR, PARP and other regional development programmes that promoteth e creation of consortiums science-investors(industry, venture capitalfunds, etc).

The exper ience of AndrzejBialkowski-Miler is that many projects presented to those programmes

do not have much commercial futurbut still are receiving lots of money.Still, he is not pessimistic about theachievement of the goal which the EUfunds have. Even if many fail to crealea product, the goal of establishing cooperation bonds between the industry and the academia is being fulftlled.

Independently of the achieve-men t or not of their goal, my experience, and that of many colleaguesth a t have applied or seen the projectsthat they manage granted EU funds,through one of the ment i oned programmes is that they carry a huge bureaucratic burden. It is sometimes diifteult to understand the objective ofsome reuirements of the administra t ion and the great amount of do c-uments that each project has to gather makes things so difficult that onewonder s how can it be physically possible that the public servants supervising the projects read even a smallfraction of those do cument s . Surprisingly enough, they still manage toftnd even the slightest mis take andpromote it to the level of intolerableflaw or make additional reuirementsbased on rather Kafkian reasoning.Marek Zagulski, CEO and Co-founder, Genomed said during the conference that because th e EU funds haveto be given by Polish institutions inorder to get the money one has to gothrough what he called "a way throughheli". He also added that because ofth a t Genomed has four people working fuli time just to answer questionsfrom the admini strat ion. I must saythat his words didn't surprise me at all.

The hostile attitude of the administra t ion towards the citizens is a prblem that shocks any foreigner livingin Poland. After eleven yea rs livingin this country and asking everybodywhom I could the reasons of that be-haviour I came to the conclusion thatvery probably it is due to a kind of phi-losophy of the administration bornduring the communist times that sawth e "public servants" as the systenTsfirst line of defense, something thathas evolved into defending the systemagainst possible misuses and abusesby the people that have issues to treatwith the state. I have witnessed duringth e last years a slight but progressivechange in attitude towards a philosophy of the administration as a public service that is happening probably

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because the directors, formed duringth e previous regime, are beginning toretire and I foresee that the influenceof many emigrants coming back willspeed up the change sooner or later.

Another factor that is greatly in-fluencing the work of many groups ofto p scientists is the creation of buildingcomplexes with state of the art labora-tories and technologies like the Centrefor Preclinical Research and Technology (CePT) in Warsaw, and the WrocawResearch Centre (EIT).

The heart of CePT institutes is con-centrated in an area of no more thanon e suare kilometre, very close towirki i Wigury Street. The three major Polish universities are part of theconsortium that constitutes it andthere are seven research institutes.For Marcin Szumowski, president ofth e Medicalgorithmics company andManaging Director of BTM Mazovia,th e scal of the projects that such technology parks allow and the number oftransfer of technology deals that takeplace in them makes it possible forstart-up Companies to be able to reachth e point where they need no more tofive from public funds.

Very important also, during thelast years has been the establishmentof clusters where scientists and investors meet and can integrate the needsof the industry with the possibilitiesof the scientiftc community to meetthose needs. During the Series of con-ferences Marcin Szumowski, Managing Director of BTM Mazovia, citedth e definition of a Cambridge cluster:A cluster is a place that makes it possible to reduce the number of phonecalls from twenty t o two and actuallygetting to the right person in the secon d phone call.

Andrzej Biakowski added that theapparition of clusters, both legallyestablished and those of less formalcharacter, is probably the most impor t an t factor in promoting the cooperation between science and industrybecause it gives the Opportunities tomeet and gain trust to each other andftnd matching competences and resources that can be used for c ommonbenefit, this however wouldn't havebeen possible without the EU fundsth a t stimulated the contacts.

Something that is rarely mentionedas an important aspect that needs tobe built between science and industry

is trust. Scientists tend to think thatwhen people from industry approachth em it is only to exploit them, to gettheir lifetime's work fruits in exchangeof nothing. It is the natu r of businessto negotiate to take as much as possiblefrom the other side and for the lowestpossible price but even in business it iswell known that a long-term relationship cannot be based on that strategy.

On the other hand, industry veryoften doesn't treat science seriously.A phrase very often heard in businesscircles is that "science doesn't deliver."That means that when you agree witha scientist to achieve a goal, in the pro-cess of achieving it, something moreinteresting could arise and the scientist would decide to pursuit an alter-native goal. Finally when the investo r asks what he or she has done theywill say that a lot of articles were pub-lished and a few great scientiftc dis-coveries were done.

Fo r Andrzej Bialkowski-Miler it isbasically a problem of working hab-its and mind paths, or more bluntlyspeaking- communic ation. On theon e hand it is not good when industryhas too much power over the scientists and on the other when an investo r wants to go from technical point Ato B there is, metaphorical ly spe aking, a sea between both points withplenty riffs and rocks and the scientist is the one who has the ability toavoid them. Therefore the industryneeds to trust the scientists whileth e scientists need to adhere to theobjectives marked by the industry.Andrzej Biakowski explained thathis mi ssion at BTM is to work most -ly as translator, joining people fromboth worlds and helping the m to cre-ate a common language and culturet h a t will allow them to trust eacho the r and sail to the objective. Marci n Szumowski also added that thereneeds to be mutual and open relation-ships with honest and alligned goals- trust on the funding end on the research science inventor end and in thetech transfer as well as more collab-orative innovation, developing commun ic a t ion and a joint effort to solvecomplex problems.

At last but not at all the least impor t an t of the factors that I see veryoften in my job is the heterogeneousat t i tude towards intellectual property protection between th e scientists.

It is of par amoun t importance forth e industry to have the exclusivityof the production and commercialisation of the products that are devel-oped by them or the teams workingfor them. The reason is very simple,it is the only way to recover the hugeinvestments mad to develop a prod -uc t and that is something that oftenca n only be assured by a patent. Butpatents cannot be granted to inven -tions that have been disclosed beforeth e application and it is hard for scientists to comply with that conditionbecause their prestige depends onpublishing the results of their work.It is also quite common that a scientiftc group working on a project do notcheck before emb arking on it if thereare other groups patenting productsthat come from the same area of work,which can give rise to bad surprises when receiving an InternationalSearch Report from a national or anyof the supranational patent au thor ities. There are also scientists that dovery well their patentability researchand choose a patent attorney who issupposed to be specialized in theirfield but happens to be poor at writingpatents . This is not unusual becauseth e number of patents issued in Poland is Iow and most of the experienceth a t the patent attorneys possess isin translating the text of foreign patents into Polish or applying for Polishpatents , which are not required to beof high quality. If the new EuropeanUnitary Patent substitutes the actu-al local system that sourc e of incomebased on translations will disappearand those unable to write good patents will have to learn to do it or experience a professional failure. Thereis a strong opposition from the Polish chamber of patent attorneys toth e Unitary Patent and there is also astrong media campaign announcingapocal yptic effects on Polish busine ssbut I still haven't seen a scientist or anengineer complaining about it.

Altogether, the relationship between Science and Industry in Poland is at its infancy. It is a compli-cated infancy but one that, thanks tot h e vast intellectual resources thatth e young scientists constitute, thetalent of the Polish businessmen andth e help of the appropriate policies,gives many reasons to be optimisticabout the futur. ::

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