BioCentury
ARTICLE | Finance

Turbo-charging Italian biotech

Why Sofinnova put its BiovelocITA accelerator in Italy

November 23, 2015 8:00 AM UTC

Sofinnova Partners is teaming up again with management from its most successful Italian exit to run BiovelocITA, a biotech accelerator in Italy that aims to generate a pipeline of investment opportunities. The French VC and other undisclosed investors seeded BiovelocITA with €6 million ($6.4 million) to conduct preclinical killer experiments for assets initially sourced from Italian tech transfer group TTFactor.

According to Sofinnova's Graziano Seghezzi, Italian research institutes have been producing good science, but the country has lacked management talent and capital to translate them. According to BioCentury's BCIQ database, in the past 10 years Italian biotechs have raised only $120 million in venture capital, less than 1% of the $14.8 billion total for all European biotechs. ...