Please meet Julien Bérard, Global Director Business Development Biomaterials at Corbion, one of our consortium members.
“Corbion is a company focusing on food but also on health. We have a core technology that is fermentation based to produce lactic acid, for instance, and we leverage this lactic acid in the biomedical fields to make polylactic acid and bioresorbable polymer in general that can be used for medical devices and biopharmaceutical products as well.”
“When you look about the history and the innovation in health care, it comes from material that were passive to material that were more active. And now we are entering the field of regenerative medicine where we need materials that are interactive. That means that we need to control and we need to design more clever materials, but we cannot do that alone.”
“A consortium like Smart Biomaterials is exactly this type of environment. When you put the different actors together to not only develop one piece of the puzzle, but also to know how to make the puzzle and understand what the puzzle can do. We collaborate and we innovate together. We have people who process our materials. We can immediately tell what works and what doesn’t work. But also when we think about how the materials should look like and what it should do, then it’s very important to communicate with the end user, the one that will have designed that medical device, so you can accelerate the project right way.
Together with Vivolta and STENTiT, you are working on the first collaboration within SBMC. What can you tell us about that?
It’s just starting, actually, and now we need to push the prototype through to the different stages towards commercialization. That is a fantastic exercise within SBMC as a first project because everyone else would be able to learn from it and we will know what it takes to actually commercialize a product.