A long-term priority for the Milner is to share our experience of working with industry with other academic institutes, with the goal of fostering wider cross-sector collaboration. Colleagues from affiliated academic institutes have participated in our annual Symposium for many years and, this month, we were excited to initiate a reciprocal visit to Spain with our pharma partners.
Representatives from five of the pharma partners in the Milner Therapeutics Consortium visited the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) and the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) on November 10-11th, together with our Head of Partnerships Alison Schuldt. This provided an excellent opportunity to meet with the Institute leadership, innovation teams and researchers, discuss the Milner model and learn more about the research focus and key technological capabilities at the institutes. The hope is that this will foster new relationships and collaborative potential in Barcelona.
I believe that the Milner model has strong potential to be applied in other academic centres of excellence and am pleased that colleagues in these institutes are considering how this might be adopted for local engagement with industry.
Science generates new knowledge that improves our health and well-being and at the same time generates wealth and employment. Fostering collaboration between companies and research centres is vital to accelerate the transformation of the cutting-edge science that we carry out and transform them into solutions that are readily available for patients.
Meetings like these are good news, as they help foster opportunities so that the science carried out at our centre can end up reaching society. The dynamic role of entities such as the Milner Therapeutics Institute is extremely important to reduce the gap between the different sectors.
Members of the Milner Therapeutics Consortium together with leadership team and researchers from the CRG (left) and IRB (right). Images courtesy of CRG and IRB, respectively.