BioSpain 2008 aiming to double visitors

The organisers of the biannual BioSpain meeting have launched the events 2008 meeting with the prediction that numbers will double over 2006, which saw over 1,000 vistitors of 20 nationalities, and more than 40 exhibitors.

BioSpain 2008 will be held from 17 to 19 September in the Granada Congress and Exhibition Centre. The event is primarily a business platform for making contacts, attracting customers and investors and forging commercial relationships that foster wider access to Spain’s growing biotech market.

According to Regina Revilla, current Vice-President of organisers ASEBIO, the Spanish Association of Bioenterprises, “At five months from the event, we have a business participation with almost threefold the number of biotech exhibitor companies compared with the 2006 edition, a figure that reflects the staunch will of the biotechnology industry to be a power force in the Spanish economy.”

In recent years, says ASEBIO, biotechnology in Spain has become a driving sector in the country’s economy, with current figures indicating that it supports 44,333 jobs and has a turnover of €5,359 million, equivalent to 0.6% of the country’s GDP.

 For José Luis Jorcano, Director General of the Genoma Spain Foundation, “BioSpain 2008 confirms the great moment the biotechnology sector in Spain is going through. This sector in our country is currently growing at a rate 17 per cent faster than the EU15 average, and thanks to this rapid growth, the Spanish biotech industry will have converged with European biotechnology by the year 2015,” he underlined.