The Grenoble area, already well represented in biotechnology and healthcare, has just set up an organization to encourage the development of specialist fi rms. Biopolis aims to stimulate new enterprise in an innovative sector through technology transfer.

Among the challenges facing us, we need to understand and treat genetic and neurological diseases, fi nd alternatives to fossil fuels, and improve agricultural yields and the quality of food. Such work demands a base to facilitate the emergence of new solutions.
Biopolis, recently opened in 2006, is a business incubator that welcomes budding entrepreneurs as their project nears maturity, and a business centre specially designed for bio-industries.
But Biopolis is much more than just a reception facility. It offers turnkey services for emerging biotechnology fi rms. Each rental unit has a secure modular laboratory, fi tted with microsystem workshops, biochemistry and molecular biology laboratories, and P2-grade facilities. Among the companies that have already moved in, Praxim, Koelis and EndoControl have the makings of a surgetics network, specializing in computer and robot aided medical interventions.
With Minatec, Europe’s leading centre for micro and nanotechnology, which increasingly opens onto biotechnology, and the NanoBio innovation centre involving universities, research centres and Grenoble’s university teaching hospital, Biopolis can count on an environment conducive to synergy, with the certainty of the local authorities’ unswerving
support.