Every day in Irish research institutions, great research is being done. But these scientific insights, valuable as they are, are often difficult to translate into a commercially successful company. The Government recognises this and now has its eyes on the prize, with the creation of spin-out companies from State-backed research an explicit priority. The latest Research Ireland strategy sets a target of 50 active spin-out companies to be founded by Research Ireland-funded researchers, while among the ambitions of the Tyndall National Institute’s new strategy is the establishment of 10 new spin-outs from its research activities by 2030. “The creation of spin-outs is important, because we need to derive tangible value and a return on investment from research, ensuring economic impact and job creation by moving research out of the lab into real-world applications and products,” says Aisling McEvoy, head of enterprise partnerships with Research Ireland. “This is in strong alignment with the Government’s priority to build its indigenous sector to ensure a better balance with foreign direct investment.” Ireland enjoys what is regarded as a healthy funding ecosystem. Enterprise Ireland invests in approximately 90 per cent of university spin-outs across all sectors via mechanisms such as its Commercialisation Fund, which provides up to €500,000 to help researchers develop technologies and teams required to spin out. The agency also offers pre-seed funding up to €100,000 and High Potential Start-Up (HPSU) equity programmes to help researchers and founders scale these innovations. Aisling McEvoy, head of enterprise partnerships at Research Ireland Under the auspices of Knowledge Transfer Ireland (KTI), Enterprise Ireland now funds and co-ordinates staff members in each university’s Technology Transfer Office (TTO), whose job it is to mine current research activities to see what could possibly be commercialised. Ireland does not have a “discovery problem”, notes Dr Fiona Killard-Lynch, chief scientific officer and director of research & innovation at National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training (NIBRT). “It’s clear that we have outstanding science and scientists,” she says. “The opportunity now is to ensure more of those discoveries become products, companies, and ultimately solutions for patients.” The hardest part of innovation, she says, is often not invention, but translation. “That is precisely where Ireland has an opportunity to lead.” While Ireland has benefited enormously from foreign direct investment (FDI), the goal now should be to diversify and focus on the building of our own highly innovative indigenous companies, agrees Dr Vincent Kelly, an associate professor in biological sciences at Trinity College Dublin and academic director of the ARC Hub for biotherapeutics. “An interesting report came out not that long ago showing that actually Italy is the best-performing country in Europe when it comes to spin-outs for people under 25 – it’s probably because of the fact that their economy is struggling a little bit and they have to be innovative,” notes Kelly. “We are very reliant on FDI, and this is not really sustainable. We need to be generating our own companies and create an infrastructure and an environment that is conducive to helping companies spin out.” “The opportunity now is to connect our strengths more effectively so that more Irish discoveries become Irish companies,” Killard-Lynch says. “We are starting from a position of strength rather than weakness, but we need to focus our efforts on enabling home-grown biopharma development and growth.” The good news is that “the engine is being revved up” in this regard. Kelly namechecks the Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund (DTIF), a €500 million challenge-based fund established under Project Ireland 2040 which aims to support collaborative research and accelerate company development. There is also the Irish Government’s Seed and Venture Capital (SVC) Scheme, a €250 million initiative running from 2025 to 2029, which will provide crucial risk capital for indigenous start-ups and scale-ups, with a strategic focus on high-growth areas like green tech, AI, and life sciences. Successful commercialisation creates a virtuous cycle, notes Killard-Lynch. “It brings new therapies and technologies closer to patients, creates high-value jobs, attracts investment, develops talent, and generates new research opportunities,” she says. “It strengthens both the economy and the research system. Every successful spin-out creates experience, expertise and ambition that feeds the next generation of innovators.” “A key benefit is economic growth and job creation thorough translating research into high-value companies and industries, which creates skilled, well-paid jobs, particularly in deep tech, life sciences and AI, and drives indigenous enterprise growth, which helps to achieve a better balance between indigenous companies and multinationals,” adds McEvoy. NIBRT Researcher with a small scale bioreactor But when it comes to spin-outs and start-ups, Ireland’s track record to date is quite mixed, Kelly says. “My area is life sciences, and if you look at the area of medtech, we have been very successful, but in therapeutics, not so much,” he admits. If Ireland wants to take a slice of the substantial pie available in advanced biotherapeutics, it needs to play the long game, he says. “We need to first build the capabilities for therapeutics development – it’s a long-term goal, as it’s very heavy infrastructure that’s needed, and it’s also very bespoke knowledge that’s needed, in order to be successful. What you find in the biotech space is that one success begets another success and another success because they are building on the infrastructure that is already there.” But while some researchers might argue the opposite, Kelly says funding isn’t everything. “It’s not a case of throwing money, it’s a case of throwing brains at the problem,” he says. “There’s nothing stopping Ireland from transforming the way that it operates its economy towards us being self-starters. We have the resources, we now have extremely good universities, we have extremely good students, and we are recognised on the world stage, even though we’re a tiny, tiny country.” With a “world-leading biopharmaceutical ecosystem”, all of the ingredients are already here to make successful biotherapeutic spin-outs a reality, Killard-Lynch says. “The challenge we are facing now is in creating more pathways that connect them. We have spent decades building an ecosystem – the opportunity now is to harvest more value from it.” Any form of entrepreneurship comes with a high risk of failure, but the good news is that Irish researchers now have strong support to help them identify any potential banana skins as they try to make their way from bench to bedside. NIBRT sits in that “challenging space” between universities and commercial manufacturers, explains Killard-Lynch. “NIBRT is structurally designed to help researchers cross that gap because we sit at the point where scientific discovery meets the realities of manufacturing and delivery.” Many promising technologies fail, she says, not because the science is weak, but because they cannot be manufactured, scaled, or implemented. “By providing translational research capability, industry engagement, specialist infrastructure, and manufacturing expertise, we can help researchers develop technologies that are not only scientifically exciting but commercially viable,” she explains. “One of the biggest reasons life science spin-outs fail is that they discover too late that a technology which works in a laboratory cannot be manufactured at scale. NIBRT helps address that challenge much earlier.” For example, the IDA/Research Ireland -funded CONCEPT facility located at NIBRT allows researchers to test not only whether something works scientifically, but whether it can ultimately be manufactured, scaled and deployed. Kelly explains that the ARC Hub is another institution acting as a hotbed for ideas and attempting to help researchers circumvent some of the hurdles to bringing an idea all the way to market. “People have an idea in the lab, and they develop it slightly, and what we do then is we externalise that idea to people who are experts in the field. So, it really is about throwing brains at it and it’s amazing how well that works. If you design a project correctly from the very beginning you have a much higher chance of it succeeding, especially in a therapeutic space.” Other ARC (accelerating research to commercialisation) Hubs have been established in the areas of healthtech and ICT. The Tyndall Institute, Ireland’s largest deep-tech research centre, is based in Cork, and specialises in ICT hardware and systems, helping innovation make the tricky transition “from lab to fab” (fabrication). Prof William Scanlon, the institute’s chief executive, says its 2030 strategy – and the focus on spin-out generation – positions the institute not only as a centre of research excellence, but as a “translation engine” – converting breakthrough science into technologies, companies and industry capability at scale. “Tyndall has demonstrated that it is possible to succeed and punch above our weight in this domain,” Scanlon says. “But our experience also makes clear that realising this opportunity consistently – and at scale – requires co-ordinated national support across funding, infrastructure, and industry engagement.” There is now a “once-in-a-generation opportunity”, Scanlon believes. “And ambition needs to match opportunity in this area. We need a step change in scaling mechanisms, access to growth capital and clear pathways from research to manufacturing and deployment.”