Held in Berlin in March 2010, the Charité Entrepreneurship Summit for Healthcare brought together some 400 people − scientists, medics and tech transfer experts alongside entrepreneurs, business angels, venture capitalists and patent lawyers, among others − from Europe and the US. A central goal for the Summit was to look for innovative ways of bridging the ‘valley of death’, that chasm between the inspiration in the lab and its arrival as medication or an appliance in use.

The waning of creativity in Big Pharma, the cumbersome procedures of governments and traditional foundations, an organizational risk aversion quite separate from issues of patient safety – these are some of the barriers to be overcome through much more fluid and dynamic relationships between science, medicine, business and finance.