Recent news from the pharma industry seem to be mainly driven by buzzwords like cost pressure, ROI, shareholder value, restructuring, or merger and acquisition. The consequence for R&D departments is a tremendous pressure towards a streamlined process and enhanced pipeline. This has initiated a rethinking and refocusing on core competences. From Genedata’s perspective, an increased interest to outsource concepts and interdisciplinary external collaborations on the project level can be observed.

Similar boundary conditions have driven the early discussions in industrial biotech and resulted in the current scenarios. Here, we report a biased screenshot for Europe. We will review and show a map of established collaborations with industrial partners, academic partners and research consortia. Projects towards systems biology, cell factory, metabolic engineering, genomics design or synthetic biology, to name a few, in industrial biotechnology require interdisciplinary teams and a comprehensive infrastructure to handle the increasing amount of publicly available and proprietary data from various sources. Based on a scientific research focus and different applications we will outline the motivation to go for a centralized data management infrastructure provided by Genedata. Finally, we will outline and discuss new research-driven synergies, further developments and collaborations between industry and academia in Europe for industrial biotech and systems biology.