"Vanguard of Knowledge" awarded the winners
Seven scientists became prize-winners of the competition "Vanguard of knowledge"
The competition is held for the second year in a row by the international biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca with the support of the All-Russian Science Festival and Russian Development Institutes.
This year, the number of applications submitted for the competition has doubled – 221 scientists from 26 cities of Russia claimed the victory.
The winners of the competition will receive 450 thousand rubles each, as well as the opportunity to continue their research in partnership with Russian development institutes.
The awarding ceremony was held in the format of a discussion on the topic "Pharmaceutical innovations: from the laboratory to the patient", the key topic of which was the optimization of the process of introducing scientific developments into practice. The main obstacles to the promotion of scientific developments to the market are considered by its participants to be a lack of funding, insufficient coordination of the actions of scientific organizations and the state, as well as a low level of knowledge of Russian scientists in the field of commercialization of their successes.
The participants of the discussion emphasized the role of venture funds, since if the early stages of development can be financed with grant funds or developers' own funds, then at later stages a biotech startup should attract third-party investments.
"Funding for relatively inexpensive exploratory research can be found, for example, within the framework of grants from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, projects of the Ministry of Education and Science, or grants from other Russian and international foundations. Difficulties arise with the financing of R&D of pharmacological substances that are at "intermediate" stages, when the cost of research is already quite high, and the risk of negative results is still quite high," the opinion of the head of the department of the V.N. Orekhovich Research Institute of Biomedical Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences Vladimir Poroikov is given in the message.
During the discussion, it was noted that one of the effective tools for bringing innovative solutions in the field of medicine to the market can be the cooperation of academic science and international pharmaceutical business.
"Many pharmaceutical companies, including AstraZeneca, are creating partnership alliances with scientific groups to jointly develop innovative drugs or technologies necessary for this. In Russia, we are also actively searching for strong research groups – our potential partners. In addition, we try to be integrators of the innovation process, acting as a link between the scientific community and venture capital, as well as Russian development institutions," the head of AstraZeneca's R&D information support in Russia and Eastern Europe, head of the company's Bioinformatics and Prognostic Medicine Center in St. Petersburg is quoted in a press release. Vitaly Prutsky.
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