 Welcome back everyone and thank you for having been with us through this very interesting afternoon and to conclude this first day of this workshop on the technology transfer in life sciences I would now like to welcome to the podium Jan Matai who is the director of Human Technopole, most of you will know them already, he's been leading this institute right from the start after a long experience as director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and he will give us, offer us some conclusion for the day and welcome. Thank you very much Nicola and thank you for the invitation. I'd also like to thank the partners, Jus, Netval and particularly Fabio and Marica who have put a lot of work into organizing this meeting and as I was just saying to the speakers before we started that I've been in a meeting of our board for, I'm not going to tell you whether it's spelled B-O-A-R-B or B-O-R-R-E-D but I've been in a board meeting all afternoon and it was so interesting that I actually was able to follow the talks and so I thank all three of the speakers who participated in the first session and Nicola for his moderation. I thought it really was a very interesting and broadly based range of messages about technology transfer which are very important to, particularly to inform people who are interested in developing their research towards innovation to hear and it's, I think there is, you know, this is not unique to Italy but I think the country is often quite pessimistic in presenting itself but I think there are really good grounds for hope that there will be more good developments in this area in the country. The Milan area of course is famous for startups and of course San Rafael is one of the drivers of these startups but I noticed a couple of weeks ago buried in an article which was talking about how depressing it was that the ERC grant awardees in Italy or the Italian ERC grant awardees were almost all not in Italy. To see that, in fact, Italians in Italy were the second largest national group for proof-of-concept grants. In other words people are interested in obtaining funding to cross the so-called valley of death between having made a discovery and getting to the point where you may be interested, you may be able to interest investors in funding this to develop it further towards the market. So I think that as in many things, I think the picture is not by any means a black one. So I don't have very much that's original to say you already had three very good and very experienced speakers talking previously and Nicola's introduction obviously showed his familiarity with the topic of technology transfer but there are some things I'd like to see from my experience and I'll come to my experience later and where it came from. But I think there is a progressive change in the culture of research and research institutions and individual researchers. I think there are real blocks to the system in some countries and Sandra mentioned, sorry Ricardo, mentioned professorial privilege as being one of the real blocks to innovation in some countries and when I arrived in Germany which was a long time ago in 1984, professorial privilege existed in Germany, in fact it hasn't been abolished to this point but many universities who are in many of the advanced universities have found ways around this problem and obviously in Italy the same thing is true that some of the universities have very good systems for technology transfer in spite of having this legal block to the exploit, the easy exploitation of discoveries. So this change in culture is taking place. Why is it changing? Why is it necessary? Why is it important? Why are things changing? I think from my point of view there are two major drivers. I think it's very important for places that do excellent research to demonstrate the value of research towards society and that there are different ways of doing this. Communicating about research and communicating about the results of research broadly is one thing but contributions to society through innovation are another and I think that there are places where it's very obvious if you work in a hospital based institution and again Sandra is a super example, if you can work together with foundations, with companies and with your clinical colleagues to develop discoveries that are made in research into treatments, this is fabulous. What better news could there be for society than the development of new treatments? It's obvious that I'm an RNA biologist more or less by genetics and it's obvious I would mention mRNA vaccines. I worked on mRNA and other forms of RNA for 25 years and I'd like to think in a small way like many, many, many other people who worked in this field that I made a contribution to the fact that it was possible 70 years after the discovery of messenger RNA and the genetic code and so on that they can be used in this innovative way. I want to emphasize using this example also that these mRNA based vaccines have played a fantastic role in getting us to the increasingly comfortable position, still uncomfortable but increasingly comfortable instead of getting worse situation in regard to SARS-CoV-2. But you know it's good science and it's good applied science raises also the next question and the next question is the delivery efficiency of the messenger RNA and the delivery method of the messenger RNA that's used in mRNA vaccination is from the stone age. You have this fantastic tool and you wrap it in globs of fat and stick it into people and an incredibly low efficiency the messenger RNA is taken up by itself and used. And the next challenge in this area and this is actually in I think it's probably one of the biggest challenges in all area of drug development is efficient targeting, efficient and accurate targeting to the cells that you want to hit. It's been a problem that's been around for I don't know probably 35, 40 years since people started to think seriously about this and we have made zero progress because there isn't funding for the basic cell biology that would be needed to help move this in an innovative sense in a sense of using the information forward. So there's always more to do and there's always more research to do. Don't worry about it. The other reason I think is really good that there's a change in culture towards innovation is because it's a lot of fun. Scientists are by nature curious people. I was a company founder in the 90s. I discovered all sorts of interesting and bizarre things about venture capitalists including being involved in a reverse takeover where our company with no money but some good ideas took over a company that was worth a hundred million dollars by force of personality. This is not the world of science. You can't do things like that in science. But working with these people and seeing how they operate and actually the company not to any financial benefit of mine because I had, like Luigi I think, I started as a founder when the company actually came into existence. I was a scientific advisor and my contribution to the company was diluted to such a level that by the time the company was sold to Roche I think it was sold for 270 million. I could buy myself a dinner with my share of the profits. But it still gives you an opportunity. It gives you an insight into a world that otherwise you would know nothing about. It's just interesting. It's fun to find out about new things. I also got me a lot of free business class flights to La Jolla because the company ended up being based in La Jolla. If you've never been to La Jolla it's worth going there even if you have to go to board meetings. Aside from that, the other thing I'd like to emphasize and again this is not something that's new. It's been said in different ways by different people already this afternoon and probably will be repeated tomorrow, is how difficult it is to have good technology transfer professionals working with scientists. So the initiative that Fabio is leading for us is related to aspects of technology transfer but it's a very complicated process. You need to have people who really understand the science. They're not the scientists. They have to work with the scientists but if they don't understand what the scientists are saying, the project will never get anywhere. So they really need to understand science, some of them. They need to understand what's worth protecting. When is it worth to generate IP and when isn't it worth that? Because protecting IP is expensive and institutions, institutes and universities can only afford to protect a certain amount of intellectual property and the technology transfer professionals are the people who have to give advice on what to protect and what not to protect. And that can be very hard for the individual scientist who makes a discovery and is told that we don't think it's worth to protect it. But if the institutions divide their budget among all the projects which would like to have funding, none of them will ever be protected properly. So the technology transfer professionals need to do this. They need to take over from the scientists. The scientists should just talk to the technology transfer professionals if they're interested to do this and it's an interesting thing to do in my opinion but not everyone is. They will have had generally to take a decision as to whether they would like their inventions or their discoveries to be taken forward through technology transfer. Once they've taken that decision, they should as much as possible be free to focus back on their research, giving input on the research aspects of the development of the project but not having to train to be somebody who writes a patent from A to Z. They contribute to the writing of the patent but they shouldn't have to write it themselves. They shouldn't be the chief scientific officer of a startup company. It's a different job than being a research scientist. They shouldn't have to do both and it's really, I think, it's very, very difficult to try to do the two things in parallel even if your institution allows you to do that and share your time. Then once the technology transfer company has or professionals have generated IP, they need to know the market for the IP. They need to know which are the companies that might license this or might buy it outright if that's the chosen way to obtain value from the IP. Who are the other institutions, research institutions mainly, but sometimes also small or large companies, who have complementary IP, who might be possible to do things together with Luigi mentioned an example of this in his presentation. It's a very common thing to do, to consolidate complementary IP, to make a better package because it's more easy to take the project forward if you have a stronger patent portfolio and a stronger set of projects and results. The technology transfer professionals have to know this, so they have to, in total, this is not one person usually, but in total they have to be somebody who talks to the scientists. The scientists, the researchers have to trust them. In other words, they have to be able to act and behave in a way that generates trust among the scientists that they're working with. That's why they have to be embedded in the institution, the institute where the work is done, in my opinion. That trust that was mentioned also during the earlier part of the session, this necessity to build up trust among the different partners who really think in very different ways at different stages of the process is extremely important and successfully, eventually, taking something to market. Finally, they need patience because although in some areas, particularly in areas like technology development, IT, the time from discovery to market can be relatively short, that's very unusual in, for example, the life science sector. If you're talking about a drug, you're talking about a minimum of 15 years. I don't know what the gene technology timelines are, but very similar I would guess. And even if you've built a new kind of microscope and you work with a company to put this, or set up a company to put the microscope on the market, you're talking about 10 years from the time you have your prototype microscope until you have it on the market, and that's if things go well. So it's a difficult profession, it's a very, very valuable profession, and I think anything that we as human technical can do to contribute to the development of the culture that supports innovation, we'll be very happy to do. So thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much for your time and to this further reminder of the crucial importance of technology transfer and of the professionalities of technology transfer. So we're at the end of the afternoon. I mean, if there is anyone who has a very urgent question for our speakers today, and we have, I think, one last opportunity, five minutes maybe to ask it. Otherwise, we don't want to keep you here too long, so I will just take the opportunity to once again thank all our speakers today, Fabio Terragni, Riccardo Pietramissi, Luigi Naldini, and of course Jan Matai. Thanks to everyone. Tomorrow you will have another day, full day, packed with great talks. I won't be here moderating, unfortunately for me, but I recommend you to follow the whole program, which will begin tomorrow at 10 a.m. with Maria Grazia Roncarolo's talk. And thanks again, everyone, for following us today, and have a nice evening. Thanks a lot.