This post features an interview with Diana Saraceni, founder and managing partner of PANAKÈS PARTNERS , a venture capital investor that finances medical companies, early stage startup and SMEs in Europe and Israel.

Why does Panakés Partners focus on Med-Tech?

Life sciences, especially Med-Tech, have always been an innovative and growing sector. Improving health conditions is one of the goal of developed countries, and new challenges will always face us. Considering this highly changing environment, start-ups and small companies appears to have the best structure to generate innovative solutions. In Europe there are several areas of excellence in technology and chemistry, the ideal environment where promising Med-Tech start-ups can develop. Moreover, European regulatory system has faster and easier protocols for companies to get CE mark and go to market, especially compared to the American system, where FDA approval requires more efforts, both in economic and clinical terms, to enter the market. Lastly, if we consider that western countries invest, on average, 10% of GDP every year on health services and that medical and pharmaceutical enterprises are the most active in acquiring start-ups, the great opportunity Med-Tech represent for us becomes evident.

What are the specific areas where you expect more growth in the future?

Considering the ageing of population and the need of hospitals to optimize their resources and reduce costs, we expect a great demand for technologies designed for home healthcare and chronic pathologies management. These new solutions will allow patients to receive their treatment directly at their own home, letting hospitals to focus their resources on acute pathologies treatment. Furthermore, we are confident that there will be a significant growth in all technologies aimed to a minimally invasive medicine. We are talking about in vitro diagnostics systems or robot-assisted surgery, which will substitute, or at least reduce, tissue biopsies and traditional surgery. Lastly, we expect a great increase in solutions for personalized therapies. These technologies, which combine genetic profiling to Big Data algorithms, will help physicians in the definition of therapies specifically tailored for every patients, increasing the probability of success.

Which countries appears to have the best factors (in terms of legislation, culture, access to funding and applied research) that helps fostering innovation?

By tradition, Anglo-Saxons countries are the ones with a more innovation-oriented policy. Everyone who has interesting ideas is encouraged in developing them, entrepreneurs never stop to look for new opportunities and skip from one project to another, as if they have not realized anything yet, legislation offers benefits to support the creation of new companies. These are the reasons why realities such as incubators and venture capital funds were born and are widespread in these countries. Regarding the specific case of Italy, we can state that the presence of top-class engineers and the excellence of Italy in clinical research in several areas, combined with lower costs than the other developed countries, are the main factors for the success of many Italian start-ups.

Which challenges lay ahead of you?

We received hundreds of requests of funding from companies all over Europe. Now, our main challenge will be to select the most promising ones, both in terms of proposed technology and feasibility of the project. Furthermore, we need to enlarge our network, in order to reach more companies and to find those ones whith the potentiality to change the status of medicine and build up more success stories out of Europe. We like to think of Panakés as a highly entrepreneurial start-up from a certain point of view, with great opportunities and successes just waiting for us!