 So, let's get a bit deeper into the topic. What is technology transfer? What are the specificities of technology transfer in life sciences? What opportunities and challenges are there? And what are the tools that, let's say, what is the toolbox that is needed for successful technology transfer? To talk a little bit about this, I want to invite to the podium Ricardo Pietrabissa who is the rector and professor of industrial bioengineering at the School for Advanced Studies or use in Pavia. He's an expert in biomaterials, biomechanics, and medical devices, and he's also a founder and current president of NETVAL that is the Association of Universities Research Institutions that, let's say, monitors the situation of technology transfer in Italy and promotes the culture of technology transfer. So welcome Ricardo Pietrabissa and we're eager to give you a talk. Thank you, thank you very much, Nicola, and I'm very proud and happy to be here today for giving this first, believe it's first talk on the first meeting on technology transfer here in Newman Technopole also as rector of one organizer of this meeting indeed. I began to think about what technology transfer is and why we should promote activities in technology transfer, let me say, more than 20 years ago, it was 2001 when the director in Polytechnic or the Milano where I was a professor at that time asked me to establish a patent office, a patent office, so we have no idea how to patent research results and I had no idea at the time and so we made a lot of effort and particularly a lot of errors in doing that and we obtained the first success some years later because it is difficult, it is difficult to convince and to talk with researchers about technology transfer, about different goals which are not publication of scientific results and so on. So what I can teach now is what is important not to do, which are the error that can avoid to obtain success and to reach the goal of our activities and try to identify some of the best practices and which are the best tools in order to obtain some results if we want to obtain them because it's not in the heart, let me say, of research technology transfer is something that goes on. So this presentation today has been taught in order to establish a contact with researchers. It's not for venture capitalists, it's not for people that manage the technology transfer, it's for researchers that like to understand from my experience what is now on the table for activities in this field. So let me start with some brief introduction. I think that the majority of people that work in research like to be free to make research. Research is something that we understand like a freedom area in which what we want to search we can do. This is a definition, a very, very brief and rough definition of what is the so-called blue sky research, but it's interesting because I underlined that blue sky research is scientific research in domains where real world applications are not immediately apparent. It has been defined as research without a clear goal and curiosity-driven science. So this is very interesting because researchers that make research in the so-called blue sky or fundamental research or basic research is not interesting to the application of the research. It's interesting in understanding the nature, understanding the world, understanding the human thing and so on. I want to start from this very, very, very basic consideration about research. I want to quote Richard Feynman, which has been a Nobel Prize in 1690, 1685, and he said that physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical result, but that's not why we do it. I think that the majority of research agree with this quotation. And what we normally do in the research field is that this is based on something that I call assets of researchers, which are knowledge, we are know-how, we are infrastructure. This is one of the missions for the human technology. Human technology is to give possibility to have infrastructure for research. This is fundamental. And the research produces results, which is new knowledge. Normally, we use the new knowledge for publication. The publication is part of the improving of the assets in terms of know-how for the community, for the community. Publication is the traditional value for researchers and is scientific value. What we began to think some years ago and now is on the table is that we, with the results, with the new knowledge, we can transfer this. We call this knowledge transfer or technology transfer, depending on the cases of the field, to generate what we call an impact. Impact on the society, that means progress, new products, new services. And this area is normally considered as an innovation area, innovation in the real world. So this is a new value, is an extra value that, of course, is required to select not every new knowledge can produce innovation, new value. And this new value is also economic value, is a social value, is industrial value, is other values outside from the traditional scientific value. Normally, in the public, let me say, public research organization, the all the criteria is that the 100% of research result should improve assets at very few or almost zero is required to go for innovation. Now, in the new public research organization, and this also for many, many reasons, also for the financial support and the grants, is required that 100% goes again to the assets, but is required that an X% that can change, depending in many cases also on the field is different for engineering, physics, chemistry or medical and biological, should be devoted for innovation. This is completely different from what happens in the so-called private research organization, for instance, a research center within a company in which normally the 100% should be devoted to innovation, a very few, depending on the secret level of that company, should be published. So normally, when we interface public and private research organization, this can create some questions, some problems. This is the first point. It's normally considered that research is addressed normally and to generate progress in the society. This is very evident in some countries in which a lot of money are given for research and this generate progress, progress generate benefit and normally this induced to finance again research. What is not normal? This path is not a path that can be followed spontaneously because if the researchers publish the research results in publication, is for the very small scientific community, is not for everyone. So there is a question also in not only in transfer technology, but also in communication science and so on. So it is a very complex system. We consider that surely there are two other steps. One is the so-called innovation or innovative steps and the second is the market. The market I mean not only the commercial or the financial market, but the market in which you give valorization to your innovation in order to generate progress. So the path is much more greater and in this path, there are the role of technology transfer. It is the capacity to extract from research results those that can produce innovation in the market and the second is the money. The money is fundamental for all this project because money is a way to give an evaluation of the potential value for the progress and for the benefit of society of that innovation and is something that can be in part transferred to generate new research and so on. So it is a closed loop system. So the three main points are understanding. So the knowledge, the new knowledge generated by research is applying that is an application of new knowledge to generate new products, new services, new technologies, useful of course for the human being, for the for the environment and so on and so improving benefit and wealth to the society. Technology transfer and money are tools. So we are not to look and to check and asking to obtain patent and so on. These are tools. The general framework is this one. In this sense the role of technology transfer as a tool is capability to understand, to select new research results and to address this new knowledge for particular application to generate progress. This is not easy. This is not an easy task because this requires people who are skilled in understanding research results but also very skilled in generating application in some cases in market or in technology which are different from the one that the researchers have imagined at this level. In some cases this capability to transfer research results to the market require a third party which is a company and the company may be a third company, an existing company or in some cases they establish a new startup company which start with this new knowledge and which main role is to go on the market with some new products based on that. In this case normally also the researchers is part of this new company because he is able to drive the company with this knowledge on the particular results. So this is a general framework of what we are talking about with technology transfer. This is a so-called old paradigm of technology transfer. We have worked all around the world for a tense here on that. One of the critical points on this picture is that in many cases is very limited to particular kinds of research. Not every kind of research can pass through this process. Not every kind of research can be patented for instance. So in the larger framework of research organization we began to talk about knowledge transfer which is something greater than technology transfer. We can transfer not only something that belongs to technology in real sense but also something that belongs to capability to do something that is related to social sciences and so on. And again there are two new words which are knowledge exchange and knowledge transformations. This belongs to the capability to involve more actors in the process. In the third case is a cooperation among different actors, researchers, students, institutions, companies to generate the impact of research results. And the last one, knowledge transformation, is the capability of combining different research results to generate the impact using the innovative complexities that can generate. So this is a framework of where we are and where we are going now in the field. If you want to establish a very, very rough classification of the main phases of this process, the first is research, the second is development, and the third is application. Research means that someone may produce new knowledge, something that was not known before, and normally you go to to give a publication to update the application for the community. This new knowledge can produce hypotheses of new solutions for some problem. Okay, so we introduce the problem that can be solved in part with new knowledge. This belongs to the field of research and researchers. In many cases, this new solution can be patented. If it's an invention, we will see when we have a lecture or more focus on the different phases, what this means. But some cases, new solution for a problem is an invention and can be patented. So can be acquired as a property that can be managed as a property. If we have the proof of concept, the testing of this solution, and this seems good, this is a so-called development phase. So I want to establish that this idea, this hypothesis of solution is tested, is evaluated, and can be useful for application. So that with capital, because this is necessary to invest money in technology and products, we can go to the application in the real world. So this is a process in, let me say, generally in different field of technological research, but also in scientific research in many cases. There is a particular difference, in my opinion, in the kind of research that is a great part of life science research, which I call here research in medicine. Because in the case of research in medicine, it's very common that the researchers is an idea of the possible application at the beginning. This is different from physics, it's different from chemistry in many cases. In the field of medicine, the researchers has an idea of the possible application of the results of research. Because the motivation is not only curiosity, but also the interest in solving a problem that is able to observe in the day life, in the hospital, for instance. So what is different, in the case of research in medicine, normally the researchers is able to conduct part of this path also in the proof of concept, in the testing. This is an extraordinary advantage for the researchers in medicine with respect to the research in other field, in which normally in other field they stop with the idea of the solution, is not with the testing of the solution. Now the situation in Europe is particularly interesting. This is a figure, you can see the data from the beginning of one year ago, let me say. This is the last report of the European Patent Office. European Patent Office is a body that manages the patent we are filed in Europe. Not only from European owner, but worldwide you can apply for having a patent in Europe. So these are patent from the Patent Office. And now you can see there are three fields, which are medical technology, pharmaceuticals, and biotechnologies, which are now the larger field of patent in Europe this last year. You can see that medical technology is number one, more than digital communication. This can be strange or computer technology and so on. And as a growing rate, the largest is pharmaceutical, the second is biotech, and the third is medical technology. So this of the life sciences is a field in which the majority of investment for new invention and patent is present. And in particular if you can see how this is distributed in all the countries, you can see that medical technology that is back in the lead now at comparison is very similar from European countries and from US in the field of pharmaceutical that grow more than 10% with respect to the previous year. Again, the US and the European country has largely the majority of patent. In the case of biotech, biotech is more general field and it's not all the medical as you know, but in the kind of biotech you can see that European country has the majority of activity that produce patent. So this is very important and can have also with this an idea of the market interest in this field. I want to show you an interesting case. This is a research I did some years ago. Anyway, it's interesting in my opinion. How is moving the interest of this field of technology transfer using patent as a key point? You know very well that there are some pathologies that now can be treated with technologies. This is a classical case very normal of ortho-arthritic. In this case I present ortho-arthritic knee and the regular, the normal solution is the prosthesis. Prosthesis is a technological product. It's a medical device. It's nothing related to biology. It's metal. It's organic material. Some years ago it began to grow the interest of substituting cartilage, damaged cartilage with this so-called bio-artificial cartilage. This is something related to tissue engineering and technology of managing cells and growing cells with particular scaffolds and so on. The first prosthesis is very common, very common every day used in every hospital. Bio-artificial cartilage is very rare. It's not on the market like the first one. But if you can see as a growth, these are data in the market from medical devices which include old medical devices and tissue engineering and cell therapy which include all that. You can see that the medical device is very important. This is a data from the worldwide. Very important but the growth in the last 12 years is to be doubled while in the field of cell therapy it's changed from 7 to 35, five times. So the growth is much more rapid and we can imagine that in the last time, say 20 years, 30 years, probably this new kind of technology will substitute the old technology of using material like metal or plastic material. This is interesting if you look at the patent trend or what are the interests in having property or solution. You can see the green lines represent the field of joint prosthesis. Patent, we have joint prosthesis in the title or in the abstract and you can see that it's normally reached a plateau or about 100 per year while in the field of tissue engineering there is an extraordinary growth in number of patent applied on this field starting more recently at the end of the 90s. If you see who are the first 20 applicants that the larger portfolio of patent in the field, this is the field of joint prosthesis and you can see that all of the first 20 patent applicants in terms of number of patents are companies they had to defend the market so they use patent to defend the market. As you see it's interesting because the fourth is Bank of America. Why Bank of America? Because in US you can give a patent for guarantee a loan, a financial loan. So they have a lot of patent as a share with company that they finance for the market. If you can see the network, so the relation for a single patent between different bodies, you can see that in the center of this Bank of America they finance all the companies that produce in the United States these kind of products on the base of patent. These are the first 20 applicants in the field of tissue engineering and we are only two companies all the others have universities and research centers. We have no market so they are not interested to defend a product on the market. The first one is US Health which is the NIH the agency that give money for research and of course want to have a share in the patent. What is this? This is the capability to be involved in the next phase in which company want to develop or will develop a new product based on research because they have the patent and they can negotiate the patent for having money for make research. So it's very fundamental this also strategy. This is a strategy of medium long time but it's a very important strategy and you can see how many universities from China, for instance, in this field. This is very interesting. In the United States the two major not on the net are as you can see before US Health NIH and MIT. This is a situation you can read with this data what is happening in the strategic area for having the ownership of research results which is free from the knowledge but is fixed and is only for the application and the solution. So let me go briefly to the conclusion. If we talk about life sciences and technology transfer life sciences it's important to make a difference among different type of research because different is perform technology transfer in the field of pharma in the field of device biotech or digital. There are also some innovation in life science in digital field but it's very much more easy to develop technology transfer in the digital that in the pharma. So also the tools and the practice are completely different. The second phase I already said is development also in the case of development you know that to develop a drug is much more expensive and require a lot of time in comparison with digital. Different again is a device it depends on the kind of device of course and so on. And to define the application which require regulatory affairs with the experiments and so on to reach the market. If you look at these four phases of the activity we can find three topics I want to focus. The first is the money involved the complexity and the technology. As I read the money normally we consider that the money for research is the lower part of the money required to reach the market. It's much more expensive normally the development phase and the application phase but we think that in this field the return on the investment can be larger than the investment. We don't know when will appear so this is a probably a risk. The second is the complexity. We should manage complexity because it's very rare that you have you follow a linear process. It's a very normally as a complex process so we have to combine knowledge in physics in chemistry, mathematics and biology, informatics. So normally technology transfer requires a combination of knowledge at least in the first two steps from research to development and to development to application. And technology that normally is following phase from development to application to application to markets require scaling up is not so easy to scale from lab to production, quality assurance, protection, production capability, economy management capability, low because you can have different problems from country to country and so on. So the process is complex. It's not the process that each of us can follow by itself. This is not possible. The three main points are knowledge transfer, technology transfer and impact require to manage these three points. One is time which is the time required to reach the market so which is the risk. The second point in terms of money because you know if you ask money for make a development you should evaluate how much money for how much time which is the risk of that. So to manage time cost and risk you should be you should be skilled not only in your research capability activity but also in the process or the technology transfer. And the last very the very last two first is that as I told you scientific research is something that produce knowledge. Knowledge normally is considered a model. A model means something that can be applied to different cases in different field and normally is done on the basis of disciplines. Each research belong to a disciplines for methodology for knowledge and so on. The development phase is addressed to phase projects which are something that go through innovation in different field area, larger area than disciplines and industrial application of course, go to the market for the economic impact and the wealth of the society. Also if the first is driven as the beginning from curiosity or from scientific questions the second is the capability to transfer knowledge for some project that in many cases different from the from the basis scientific basis and then to transfer technology that is been tested to the application. But the process should be considered a complex where complexity again means that different disciplines can contribute for the solution and this technology can contribute to the final application of let me say every practical solution. So just to give a the last consideration normally we consider that from public research let me say independent research that is based on interest in knowledge to private application which is interested in the impact the three phases which are research development and application normally unconsidered that research do your job and transfer your raw results that is knowledge or let me say something more arranged knowledge and the development phase should be done by the company. This is a in my opinion is a very old and not good solution or sketch because you give to the other the risk and if you give to the other the risk your value is very low. We should be able to manage part of this and so to put part of the development phase more close to the research and to be able to begin to think and how to address this is the case of the start up but this is the case of what we want to do in the terms of technology transfer facilities that help you in understanding the possible role to play together some risk in this phase and to transfer not the idea but the project based on that. So this is the goal let me say the last goal of what I believe human technopole as in mind is not the word is as in mind to do with this process and this is the framework in which we hope to join together. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much to Ricardo Vietramisa.