The burdens of healthcare, for example, incurable and inadequately-treated diseases, antiquated patient
care systems, and exorbitant treatment costs for patients, families and insurance companies, are a global
problem. New innovations, landmark treatments and creative solutions to the global healthcare system are
desperately needed – and these exciting breakthroughs are likely to come from all corners of the globe.
This thematic issue of Technology Transfer and Entrepreneurship is exclusively focused on the thriving
biotechnology, pharmaceutical and biomedical science communities in Poland, and as you will read in this
issue, Poland is well positioned to help lead this change.
The innovative biotech and pharmaceutical sectors have been growing organically during the last
decade in Poland. This growth has been mainly driven by visionary and entrepreneurial leaders who
successfully engaged local scientific talent pools. In fact, one of the key foundations of innovative biotech
companies in Poland is access to talented and well-educated scientists who either graduated from top local
universities or returned to the country after having accumulated significant post-doctoral experience
abroad. Admittedly, however, the pool of experienced pharma leaders and drug hunters is still relatively
limited in Poland, but this creates an area of opportunity that could attract more international talent in near
future.
Next to that, public funding for the innovative biotech sector has been growing quite substantially over
the recent years, which has also been coupled with investments in the development of research
infrastructure (incubators) established by the strongest academic centers. This, in partnership with
technology transfer activities, has enabled a number of startup companies and allowed lifting some of their
initial projects of the ground. While public funding has been very helpful, it still does not have the desired
flexibility necessary in biotech, which may positively impact on project development timelines.
Furthermore, this source of funding has become increasingly competitive and the research infrastructure is
becoming more difficult to access, owing to the rapid growth of the sector. This is where more private
funding could become opportune. Leading investors in Poland, with a few exceptions, are typically not
enticed to fund high-risk/high-reward biotech drug discovery business and prefer seemingly more tangible
areas, which have already enjoyed commercial successes (e.g. med-tech, devices). Again, this is beginning
to change, but better understanding and awareness of investment opportunities in the biotech sector are
still needed. Finally, it seems that the Polish biotech ecosystem is mature enough to attract more
international venture capital from well-established European, U.S. or Asian markets. In any case,
emerging signs of commercial success generated by Polish biotech will certainly help to turn around both
the internal and external investor base, such that this sector will flourish even more in the next few years.
The present thematic issue covers a range of perspectives and case studies contributed by some key
stakeholders of the Polish biotech scene. The readers can find insightful personal perspectives and case
studies describing the emergence and development of leading biotech companies currently operating in the
innovative drug discovery and development sector. Further, there are interesting views and metrics
pertaining to technology transfer from academia and intellectual property aspects. Finally, this thematic
issue offers a very comprehensive and data-rich historical overview of the Polish biotech industry,
followed by clear recommendations and future perspectives [1-8].
We believe that collectively these articles will be interesting to a broader international audience, and
help with better understanding of challenges and opportunities in this rapidly growing sector.
