SKOLKOVO Foundation and Janssen signed a collaboration agreement

On December 12, Kirill Kaem, Senior Vice-President at SKOLKOVO Foundation, and Luis Diaz-Rubio, Managing Director, Emerging Markets EMEA at Janssen, signed a collaboration agreement.

The agreement provides for financial support of research projects in the area of pharmaceuticals. The priority support will be given to the projects on diagnosis and therapy of socially important diseases, which will be selected on a competitive basis by the experts of SKOLKOVO Foundation together with the invited experts. The winners of competitive selection will have the opportunity to use the infrastructure of the innovation center at SKOLKOVO Foundation on favorable terms, and will receive the consumables required for research during one year. At the initial stage, it is planned to support 4 research projects.

“More than 430 projects are already being developed on the basis of SKOLKOVO biomed cluster. We are pleased to collaborate with Janssen, a recognized world leader in pharmaceutical innovation. By bringing in a partner with extensive experience, we substantially improve the chances for the continued viability of Russian research projects and adequate assessment of their relevance. In the near future, we will prepare a list of criteria for selecting the research projects and will announce an open competition among researchers and startups. The winners of the competition will also have the opportunity to access on favorable terms SkBioLab, a specially equipped lab for early stage projects, which serves as a kind of biomed hackspace,” said Kirill Kaem.