“Portugal has incredible researchers and R&D for life sciences. Society in Portugal is starting to realize that there needs to be more emphasis on the market and more attention paid to industry, but there are still many boundaries,” states Marta Ferreira, General Manager at Inovapotek, about continuing challenges within the pharma industry in Portugal.   What was the motivation behind creating Inovapotek? Inovapotek is a spin-off of the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Porto, where my partner and I were previously researchers. During my time there, I worked on a project that combined industry and academia, and I realized that much of the knowledge developed at the University was not being properly implemented. The challenge at that time was to use the experience we had attained to service the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries. Since then, the company was established with a mission and vision to promote the development of innovative products that comply with regulatory specificities and consumer demand. Many academic projects are not focused on the market and do not take existing regulatory restrictions into account.

Since many in the research field spend years investigating something that becomes nothing, our focus was to exploit our knowledge to focus on the market needs.