BioXclusters alliance

BioXclusters alliance project was funded from January 2016 to January 2018 through the European program for the Competitiveness of Small and Medium Enterprises (COSME). This partnership represents, through the clusters: 3,300 European SMEs that work in the fields of health and personalized medicine; 200 big sized pharma and biotech companies; 23,000 academic researchers and over 358,000 jobs combining both workers from the public and private sectors.

The alliance has one single overarching aim: to create the most competitive European metacluster in the field of personalized healthcare as a responsive tool for the global health challenges in the years to come. BioXclusters alliance aimed to be a mean for enhancing the competitiveness of SMEs in the sector, and offer them strategic key entry points to certain international markets of interest.

According to their Joint International Strategic Plan, the 4 clusters focused their activities on the markets explored during the original bioXclusters (USA, China and Brazil), and expanded their actions to new markets such as Japan, Australia, Canada and South Korea.

The main activities developed were:

• Enhancing the international positioning of the metacluster and strengthening the relationships with the previously explored American, Chinese and Brazilian markets.
• Building gateways to the newly targeted markets (Japanese, Canadian, Australian and Korean), and starting mutual trust relationships as a foundation for long-term agreements.
• Deploying tailored internationalization tools and support mechanisms for European SMEs in order to leverage the relationships created in the framework of the alliance.

During this second stage, the consortium focused on addressing global system healthcare challenges such as regenerative medicine, the digital development of health systems (big data, development of patient focused ICTs, etc.) and micro and nano-technologies, all of which are key for the development and good application of personalized medicine.

Japanese mission

One of the first actions developed in the bioXclusters alliance was the business mission to Japan (October 2016). During this mission, 26 European companies had the opportunity to travel to Japan and get to discover the business opportunities that the Japanese Health market (the second largest in the world) has to offer, or, if they were already familiar with the country, they were able to reinforce their previously created relationships in Japan.

Results of the project

Since it started in January 2016, the bioXclusters alliance, through the several undergone missions and activities, has:

• Contributed to signing 8 partnership agreements with Health Industries South Australia (Adelaide, Australia), Fenglin Group (Shanghai, Chine), TOHealth (Toronto, Canada), Osaka Bio Headquarters (Osaka, Japan), BioMinas (Belo Horizonte, Brazil).
• Organized 8 meeting and matchmaking sessions (cluster-cluster and B2B).
• Organized 3 international missions to Japan, China and USA.

Current status

BioXclusters alliance, even if it is not officially active and being funded at the moment, was conceived as a long-term project. This means that there are still ongoing actions related to the project as part of its long-term strategy, in order to further develop the relationships between the European companies and the markets targeted by bioXclusters alliance. An example of this long-term strategy is the webinar “An EU-Japan multi-partners alliance for supporting business in health-related life sciences”, taking place on 17th March 2021.

More information on activities developed on the framework of this strategic partnership