27 June 2016

Sherbrooke Innopole is strengthening its international partnerships in life sciences with the signature of a new collaboration agreement entitled the Twins’ International MultiHelix (TIM), with four industrial clusters in Europe:

• Life Sciences Hub Wales, Wales
• LifeTech Valley, Belgium
• Medicon Village AB, Sweden
• Fondation Inartis/Health Valley, Switzerland

With this new agreement, the five signatories hope to multiply the impact of previously signed twin agreements—Sherbrooke Innopole already has individual partnership agreements with Medicon Village, LifeTech Valley, and Life Sciences Hub Wales.

The Twins’ International MultiHelix agreement proposes a pooling of the strengths of each cluster to accelerate opportunities for working together, both at the business and research levels.

According to Josée Blanchard, Director of Business Development for Life Sciences and Micro-nanotechnologies at Sherbrooke Innopole: “One of the most important aspects of this collaboration, I believe, is the strong desire to help our respective companies develop new markets with tools that offer true added value, such as soft landing. With this approach, a Sherbrooke company can have an office at no charge for several months at one of our partners’ locations and benefit from their local expertise to increase the Sherbrooke company’s knowledge of the external market before making a full launch. Our partners’ companies enjoy the same benefits in Sherbrooke.”

Concretely, the agreement will give its founding organizations and their networks access to a vast pool of international contacts and to technical assistance in identifying partners, collaborators, and investors and in facilitating collaborations.

The TIM has a technical secretariat, MultiHelix AB, based in Sweden and chaired by Ursula Hultkvist Bengtsson, Vice-President of Medicon Village.

“One of the main strengths of the TIM is that with the establishment of a common technical secretariat we can now make funding requests to the European Union and work as a solid international network of life-science clusters,” said Ursula Hultkvist Bengtsson.

Inartis is a non-profit foundation whose main mission is to promote innovation, particularly in the life sciences and technologies, and to foster interaction among innovators and research and education institutions as well as companies working in the field. Based in Renens, Switzerland, it manages various initiatives, including the Espace Création incubators, the UniverCité community lab, and Clefs du Savoir publications.

The agreement was signed on June 22, during the Bridge Summit in Sweden. Sherbrooke Innopole delegated Christian Ekström, Trade Commissioner for Life Sciences for Sweden and Finland at the Embassy of Canada to Sweden, to represent it.

Source and photo credit : Medicon Village

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