Covid effect, 2 billion investments in Italian Life Science startups

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There are 603 new startups in the Italian Life Science ecosystem born from 2021 to today, 48 of which in the first quarter of the current year, recipients of almost 2 billion in direct investments. They are the positive legacy of the Covid era, which has given a strong acceleration to the development of digital healthcare, for two years now, driving the life sciences sector: that branch of natural sciences that deals with living organisms and which today is at the center of continuous technological innovation in the healthcare sector, particularly at the production level thanks to the presence of innovative companies.

The Biotech area is the most monitored, with 227 initiatives; followed by the new startups in the Med Tech area, which are 168, then the 112 initiatives in Digital Health and 96 in Life Science services. This is the picture presented on Monday 5 June in Milan, framed by the keywords “skills” and “investor specialization”, on the day of discussion between companies, the scientific world, technologies, venture capitalists and institutions, on the theme Is Italy (or is it not) a country for innovation in the life sciences?promoted at the Museum of Science and Technology on the occasion of the debut of Innlifes magazine.

In particular, for LifeScience startups, the central theme of the new editorial initiative, there are funds for 1.4 billion euros of Italian venture capital, in addition to 520 million from mission 6 of the Pnrr, dedicated to biomedical research. With the possibility of attracting additional resources from Pnrr mission 4, dedicated to technology transfer, which has a ceiling of 2.4 billion. On the subject, the Government is taking its steps: “We are working on the specific mission of modernizing public health structures, advancing digital medicine and improving digital therapies”, announced the undersecretary to the Prime Minister at the opening of the proceedings of Ministers with responsibility for Innovation, Alessio Butti. The Life Sciences ecosystem is in strong development and is confirmed as the most competitive, productive and dynamic at this moment in our economic history”.

Innlifes, published by Indicon benefit company, was created dedicated to this sector which in Italy has more than 5,600 companies, in the pharmaceutical, medical device and biotechnology sectors, with a production value (2021 data) of around 250 billion euros (+6.9 % compared to 2020). «It is a sector that needs and has the opportunity to accelerate: Innlifes was created to facilitate this growth process», explains Elena Paola Lanati, CEO of Indicon. «The ecosystem that generates innovation is often populated by players who don’t even know each other. The magazine wants to make its contribution to closing these gaps, above all in terms of knowledge, creating connections, informing, helping individuals (business angels), companies or institutions to understand what it means to identify excellence and invest in start-ups».

The path offers perspectives, conditioned by a greater convergence between the different actors. First of all, medicine must address the issue of digitization starting from basic research, taking into account a key factor: «Everything today moves according to preventive and personalized medicine, which changes the logic of innovation according to the ability to manage the amount of data available. It is a question of making not just one product for many, but many products for each one», underlined Gianmario Verona, president of the Supervisory Board of the Human Technopole Foundation. To achieve this, information technologies, artificial intelligence, digitization, must be innervated in the Life Science system “starting from the construction of processes, to be redesigned according to the new tools, in order to be able to implement their potential to the maximum”, as highlighted by Paolo Locatelli, scientific director of the Digital Health Observatory of the Milan Polytechnic.