HAVANA, Cuba, Nov 16 (ACN) With more than 400 research, development and innovation projects for products and services intended to replace imports and achieve technological sovereignty in key sectors such as health, BioCubaFarma has become a high-impact business organization in the country.
Eduardo Martínez, its president, explained on a TV appearance that the biopharmaceutical industry is focused on designing treatments for cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases and cancer, the main causes of death in Cuba and the world, as well as on agricultural biotechnology and natural and generic medicines.
Among the latter is CIMAvax-EG, a vaccine against lung cancer currently being tested in the United States in collaboration with the Roswell Park Institute.
Born from the merger of the scientific park and the chemical-pharmaceutical industry, BioCubaFarma’s main product is its body of enterprises, advisor Agustín Lage remarked, including facilities ranked as Hi-Tech entities, which reveals their intensive activity in research, development and innovation with high technological standards.
“Progress in this sector is essential that we should keep introducing the state of the art constantly, since BioCubaFarma is immersed in the use of technological platforms of the so-called fourth generation of the industrial revolution,” he said. “The boundaries of science are ‘moving’ up to another level, that of multi-use enabling technologies, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, robotics, numerical control, high-performance computing, and others born from the rapprochement of biological and information sciences.”
He added that nowadays scientific research and technological development become global from the outset, so Cuba must learn to manage an interactive network because going international is not only about foreign trade, but also contribution to Cuba’s biotechnological sovereignty.
Scientific policy director Rolando Pérez highlighted the design of a management model for the academy-industry interface with the University of Havana through joint laboratories to generate a culture of intellectual property, a regulatory basis and a business development structure.
Cuba has received 10 gold medals from the World Intellectual Property Organization, including one for Heberprot-P, a product used to treat diabetic foot ulcers.
During the fight against COVID-19, BioCubaFarma showed its strengths in the field of innovation through the repositioning of old products such as Jusvinza, for the care of serious and critical patients, and the development of the vaccines Abdala and Soberana.
