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Life science is a trend that is gaining speed

CSR “North West” is actively involved in this trend.

Life sciences is a general term for scientific areas in the field of protecting and improving the quality of life of living organisms. This includes biological sciences, chemistry, medicine, biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology, agricultural sciences and others.

A significant impetus for the development of life sciences was the reorientation of investment flows from the defence sector to biotechnology in the US in the 1990s. The first Life Science centres appeared at universities in 2006. Since 2010, genomic research centres have been spreading more actively, and various types of special R&D infrastructure - for example, Biofoundries - have appeared. Later, to provide translational research, consortiums and clusters in Life Science began to be created around the world.

In Russia, the science of living systems has also become one of the priority areas in recent years. For example, in the Strategy of the Scientific and Technical Revolution of the Russian Federation one can find 3 priorities - personalised medicine, productive and eco-friendly agro-economy and convergent technologies. There are 9 biotechnology clusters operating in Russia. Venture capital investments in biotechnology and medicine in our country amounted to USD 28 million in 2020.

Two weeks ago, we tried to design a Living Systems Institute with the teams from the MPI School of Science of Southern Russia. We held a business game called "Life Science Collaboration". The participants were faced with the task of formulating the Institute’s agenda through their projects: to assess the contribution of projects to the ESG agenda, to think about the intersection with the topics of other teams, to find partners among the participants, to identify industrial customers, to think over the organizational format, to select world analogues.

The game was moderated by Tibina Elena, head of project area of Center for Strategic Research “North-West”.

The presentation for the game can be found here.

This was only the first step. We plan to continue work on the creation of the Life Science Institute in the south of the country.

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