POLISH MARKET 2013-04-17

Innovation 8 medicine

Poland idea for a scientist?

Werner Deichmann, Juan Product manager at Orenore Polska
I WORK IN ORENORE, an investment

fund company which possess a Port folio with projects of the biotechnology and pharmaceutical areas apart from other areas like renewable ener gy and multimedia. The proper expansion of the portfolio reuires very accurate studies of the projects that our management nnds interesting. Many of my duties are related to the evaluation, from the Intellectual Property and the marketability points of view of projects that always seem to be extremely promising and revolutionary when they are presented to us, and they are indeed, but often more as scientific advances than as possible products that can solve, without investing decades on investigation, a current problem or necessity. In my experience I have become convinced that there is no lack of great minds in Poland. I have met many bright scientists during these years and I can see that many go to the best

universities abroad, where they meet the world leaders in their fields and work in the best laboratories but, af ter a few years, many of them come back to Poland. This is surprising if one takes into account that they come back to a country where a public fund invest ment in R&D (Research and Devel opment) has never been higher than 0.55% of the GDP, and the plans of reaching 1.9% before 2020 (the average in EU is 2%) are perceived with gen eral scepticism. In my opinion they come back to nnd something that is very rare and one of the most valuable "invisible assets" of the Polish society - the respect given to those belonging to the "inteligencja," a word that refers to the social class composed of people with the highest education and those whose work contribute to the world of culture. More surprising still is why so many bright scientists do not seem to

be having an effect in the number of patents issued in Poland. On January 17-18, the Nencki Insti tute, an institution at the avant-garde of life sciences in Poland, organized a Series of conferences, with the title of "Managing Innovation" on the subject of how the innovations coming from the academia can be converted into commercial products. Apart from my opinions, 1 will cite some of those expressed by Polish sci entists at that conference and others belonging to a conversation that I maintained with Andrzej BialkowskiMiler, an analyst and manager in the Bio Tech Med Cluster Mazovia (BTM) where he is responsible for manage ment of scientific projects both at the pre- and post-capital investment stage, as well as coaching and supporting a group of technology brokers. In order to understand why the sci ence and the industrial worlds are so far apart in Poland it is necessary first to understand how they see each other. A perception that I had in Spain, where I studied Biology and I have conhrmed in Poland is that the idea

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for a scientist is to develop his or her career in the University and achieve great discoveries that will widen and give deeper detail to human knowl edge. That objective is something that can be done only with enough government ftnancing but that idea comes from other times, when the practice of science was more related to philosophy than to a dynamically developing world in which the application of knowledge is key for the success of any economy. Nowadays it shouldn't be the only objective. But as much as the scientist wants to create new knowledge, acuire respect in their community and leave their mark for the futur what the industry wants is to make money as much and as fast as possible, to grow and to conquer markets. It is like if both worlds not only spoke different languages but had evolved eompletely different cultures. And the conseuence that I saw in Spain and now in Poland is that to work for the Industry is seen as an abandonment of the real objectives of the scientist, therefore it is a destiny for those who are less successful in the academic circles. The government should then price between the scientists their efforts to approach the industry. Andrzej Bialkowski-Miler a n swered to that observation that the government is doing a lot to promote science being commercialised. The institutes get more financial support when they develop a higher number of industrial applications. The prob lem that he sees with the incentives is that as much as the directors of scientihc institutes are evaluated by the industrial applications developed by the scientists working in the insti tute, those scientists are evaluated according to purely academic merits. That has much more to do with basie science than with its possible applica tions. Since the continuity of the sci entists in their job depends on their evaluation, the illusive financial incentives related to the commercialisation of scientiftc results are simply not strong enough for a majority of researchers and, to be effective, must be combined with other arguments, of both material and utilitarian character. The experience in USA has shown that what can most influence the

attitude of the scientists towards in dustry is to have models of success. This is difficult to happen nowadays in Poland because the risk of failure re lated to the establishment of a start-up is always high and in the case of suc cess most of the economical gains go to the University. One possible solution to the prob lem, not excluding any other options, might be to include patents to the evaluation of individual scientists. In general it is easy to see that in Poland there is a clear lack of interest of the Polish medical or pharmaceutical Companies in long-term invest ments, necessary for R&D projects reaching the phase of POC (Proof of Concept). It is much easier to ftnd Com panies willing to invest in a scientiftc project if one looks in Germany, England or the US where there are also sci entists with many years of experience in Industry. On t h a t subject Andrzej Bialkowski-Miler thinks that the most probable reason why it is difficult to ftnd Polish industries interested in R&D is because Poland is a transforming economy and still its main competitive advantage on a global mar ket is pure price; for that reason it is cheaper to produce what others invent than to risk the investors' mon ey in long and risky projects. I have heard that opinion in Spain also and when the economy was at its best. It seems to me that the natur of business is to make money easily and when that opportunity appears they always will try that way before the dif ficult. It is true also that in a matur economy there is place for Companies with enough resources to invest in a futur that looks even decades ahead and Poland is now creating the infrastructures that will make the appearance ofsuch Companies possible. A very powerful instrument that the Polish government possess to promote the establishment of rela tions between science and Indus try are the EU funds dedicated to NCBiR, PARP and other regional de velopment programmes that promote the creation of consortiums scienceinvestors(industry, venture capital funds, etc). The e x p e r i e n c e of Andrzej Bialkowski-Miler is that many pro jects presented to those programmes

do not have much commercial futur but still are receiving lots of money. Still, he is not pessimistic about the achievement of the goal which the EU funds have. Even if many fail to creale a product, the goal of establishing co operation bonds between the indus try and the academia is being fulftlled. Independently of the achievement or not of their goal, my expe rience, and that of many colleagues that have applied or seen the projects that they manage granted EU funds, through one of the mentioned pro grammes is that they carry a huge bu reaucratic burden. It is sometimes dii fteult to understand the objective of some reuirements of the adminis tration and the great amount of documents that each project has to gath er makes things so difficult that one wonders how can it be physically pos sible that the public servants super vising the projects read even a small fraction of those documents. Surpris ingly enough, they still manage to ftnd even the slightest mistake and promote it to the level of intolerable flaw or make additional reuirements based on rather Kafkian reasoning. Marek Zagulski, CEO and Co-found er, Genomed said during the confer ence that because the EU funds have to be given by Polish institutions in order to get the money one has to go through what he called "a way through heli". He also added that because of that Genomed has four people work ing fuli time just to answer questions from the administration. I must say that his words didn't surprise me at all. The hostile attitude of the adminis tration towards the citizens is a prb lem that shocks any foreigner living in Poland. After eleven years living in this country and asking everybody whom I could the reasons of that behaviour I came to the conclusion that very probably it is due to a kind of philosophy of the administration born during the communist times that saw the "public servants" as the systenTs first line of defense, something that has evolved into defending the system against possible misuses and abuses by the people that have issues to treat with the state. I have witnessed during the last years a slight but progressive change in attitude towards a philos ophy of the administration as a pub lic service that is happening probably

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because the directors, formed during the previous regime, are beginning to retire and I foresee that the influence of many emigrants coming back will speed up the change sooner or later. Another factor that is greatly influencing the work of many groups of top scientists is the creation of building complexes with state of the art laboratories and technologies like the Centre for Preclinical Research and Technolo gy (CePT) in Warsaw, and the Wrocaw Research Centre (EIT). The heart of CePT institutes is concentrated in an area of no more than one suare kilometre, very close to wirki i Wigury Street. The three ma jor Polish universities are part of the consortium that constitutes it and there are seven research institutes. For Marcin Szumowski, president of the Medicalgorithmics company and Managing Director of BTM Mazovia, the scal of the projects that such tech nology parks allow and the number of transfer of technology deals that take place in them makes it possible for start-up Companies to be able to reach the point where they need no more to five from public funds. Very important also, during the last years has been the establishment of clusters where scientists and inves tors meet and can integrate the needs of the industry with the possibilities of the scientiftc community to meet those needs. During the Series of conferences Marcin Szumowski, Manag ing Director of BTM Mazovia, cited the definition of a Cambridge cluster: A cluster is a place that makes it pos sible to reduce the number of phone calls from twenty to two and actually getting to the right person in the sec ond phone call. Andrzej Biakowski added that the apparition of clusters, both legally established and those of less formal character, is probably the most im portant factor in promoting the coop eration between science and industry because it gives the Opportunities to meet and gain trust to each other and ftnd matching competences and re sources that can be used for common benefit, this however wouldn't have been possible without the EU funds that stimulated the contacts. Something that is rarely mentioned as an important aspect that needs to be built between science and industry

is trust. Scientists tend to think that when people from industry approach them it is only to exploit them, to get their lifetime's work fruits in exchange of nothing. It is the natur of business to negotiate to take as much as possible from the other side and for the lowest possible price but even in business it is well known that a long-term relation ship cannot be based on that strategy. On the other hand, industry very often doesn't treat science seriously. A phrase very often heard in business circles is that "science doesn't deliver." That means that when you agree with a scientist to achieve a goal, in the process of achieving it, something more interesting could arise and the scien tist would decide to pursuit an alternative goal. Finally when the inves tor asks what he or she has done they will say that a lot of articles were published and a few great scientiftc discoveries were done. For Andrzej Bialkowski-Miler it is basically a problem of working habits and mind paths, or more bluntly speaking- communication. On the one hand it is not good when industry has too much power over the scien tists and on the other when an inves tor wants to go from technical point A to B there is, metaphorically speak ing, a sea between both points with plenty riffs and rocks and the scien tist is the one who has the ability to avoid them. Therefore the industry needs to trust the scientists while the scientists need to adhere to the objectives marked by the industry. Andrzej Biakowski explained that his mission at BTM is to work mostly as translator, joining people from both worlds and helping them to create a common language and culture that will allow them to trust each other and sail to the objective. Mar cin Szumowski also added that there needs to be mutual and open relationships with honest and alligned goals - trust on the funding end on the re search science inventor end and in the tech transfer as well as more collaborative innovation, developing com munication and a joint effort to solve complex problems. At last but not at all the least im portant of the factors that I see very often in my job is the heterogeneous attitude towards intellectual proper ty protection between the scientists.

It is of paramount importance for the industry to have the exclusivity of the production and commerciali sation of the products that are developed by them or the teams working for them. The reason is very simple, it is the only way to recover the huge investments mad to develop a prod uct and that is something that often can only be assured by a patent. But patents cannot be granted to inven tions that have been disclosed before the application and it is hard for sci entists to comply with that condition because their prestige depends on publishing the results of their work. It is also quite common that a scien tiftc group working on a project do not check before embarking on it if there are other groups patenting products that come from the same area of work, which can give rise to bad surpris es when receiving an International Search Report from a national or any of the supranational patent authori ties. There are also scientists that do very well their patentability research and choose a patent attorney who is supposed to be specialized in their field but happens to be poor at writing patents. This is not unusual because the number of patents issued in Po land is Iow and most of the experience that the patent attorneys possess is in translating the text of foreign pat ents into Polish or applying for Polish patents, which are not required to be of high quality. If the new European Unitary Patent substitutes the actual local system that source of income based on translations will disappear and those unable to write good pat ents will have to learn to do it or ex perience a professional failure. There is a strong opposition from the Pol ish chamber of patent attorneys to the Unitary Patent and there is also a strong media campaign announcing apocalyptic effects on Polish business but I still haven't seen a scientist or an engineer complaining about it. Altogether, the relationship be tween Science and Industry in Po land is at its infancy. It is a complicated infancy but one that, thanks to the vast intellectual resources that the young scientists constitute, the talent of the Polish businessmen and the help of the appropriate policies, gives many reasons to be optimistic about the futur. ::