Eighth CFO Summit: Analysis Provides the Basis for Recommendations on Financing Innovations

Dirk Honold, co-chairman of BIO Deutschland’s Working Group on Finance and Taxation. Photo: BIO Deutschland.

Around 100 financial experts met politicians and policymakers at the biotechnology sector’s eighth CFO Summit, which took place in Berlin on 27 May. This year’s annual finance summit, which is organised by the biotechnology sector association BIO Deutschland’s Working Group on Finance and Taxation, focused on the financing crisis in the sector. Dirk Honold, Professor of Corporate Financing at Georg Simon Ohm University of Applied Sciences Nuremberg and co-chairman of the working group, presented an analysis based on the group’s earlier discussions on the effects, strengths and weaknesses of various funding options and their impact on young, innovative biotech companies. The results of this analysis show that a citizens’ innovation fund or an expansion of the INVEST programme by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy have the greatest potential and are the most efficient means of providing the biotech sector with capital in the long term for the most important clinical phases.