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  BIOTECHNOLOGY
Encompassing 31 health biotech companies and backed up by 28 highly specialized academic research units and European partners, the Pays de la Loire region’s Competitiveness Hub (centered around the cities of Nantes and Angers) is responding to new challenges in human healthcare.
Set against a background of global competition, the key objective of this innovative hub (coordinated by Atlanpole and Angers Technopole) is to discover and produce the drugs of tomorrow in Europe and here in Western France in particular. Nantes - at the heart of the hub
From drug discovery to clinical evaluation, the «Atlantic Biotherapies» hub brings together all the stakeholders in the development of biological drugs. Atlantic Biotherapies is a group of 40 young biotech and pharmaceutical firms anchored around the university, laboratory and hospital infrastructure with the neighbour city of Angers. It fuses academic research with startup enterprises, generating a mix that means value for business, especially in pharmaceuticals, bioproduction, immunology, cellular and genetic therapy. 900 specialized researches and 14.000 healthcare professionals, plus another 650 industrial employees represent the lion’s share of the regional workforce in the biotherapy sector. Its €30-million budget has already financed 31 labellized projects in 2006. ARRONAX, a high energy cyclotron for cancer research will be commissioned at the end of 2008. This represents 33 million Euros of investment from local councils in western France, the French government and the European Union. When completed, he project
will be run by a public-private partnership. As the spearhead of a hub based on the biomedical technologies of tomorrow, the city of Nantes has endorsed a dynamic strategy for responding to unmet healthcare needs. Centered on ambitious, innovative approaches (such as cell therapy, gene therapy, immunotechnology and cell, molecular & tissue engineering), our network of industrial and academic skills has become increasingly structured over recent years. From research to industrialization
Nantes has thus demonstrated its dynamism in terms of the exploitation of research excellence not
only with industry but also in a clinical setting, with direct patient benefit in fields such as cancer, transplantation, cardiovascular & metabolic diseases and biomaterials.nutrients.
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