Joan Puig de Dou, elected new president of CataloniaBio & HealthTech

Renewal at the management of one of the main business associations in the health and life sciences sector in Catalonia. CataloniaBio & HealthTech has updated its Board of Directors at the General Assembly, which was held today at the MGS auditorium in Barcelona. The same occurs after the previous Board of Directors, led by Jaume Amat exhausted the 4-year mandate established by the statutes of the association.

After the deadline for presentation and validation in January, the candidacy led by Joan Puig de Dou, CEO of Kymos, and Mariona Serra, director of GoodGut, a company of the HIPRA group, was confirmed as the only candidate to lead the organization for the next four years. Both Puig de Dou and Serra will share the presidency of the entity, and the role will change to the other in two years.

The elected candidacy also includes Marta Palicio, director of innovation at Biokit Research & Development (second vice president) and Isabel Amat, head of Innovation and Pipeline at Reig Jofre (third vice president). The other board members will be Carmen Lagunas (Ferrer), Adriana Carré (Inteplast), Joan Comella (VHIR), Nuria Pastor (HumanITcare), and Laura Soucek (Peptomyc).

“We face the next four years with the will to continue with the growing line of the association, working for the nearly 200 members,” said Puig de Dou, already the new president. “We want to contribute to the consolidation of the business fabric of the sector in Catalonia, providing us with the tools to be more competitive and position ourselves among the most important healthcare hubs in the world,” he explained, adding that part of his task is to represent the “transversality” of the sector, a feature that the diversity of the new board of directors aims to highlight.

For his part, Amat analyzed that “4 years ago we accepted the challenge of making the merge between CataloniaBio and the HealthTech Cluster a reality, we think we have achieved it and that we have gained visibility and leadership”. He also concluded. “We have contributed to the sector’s sustained, balanced and solid growth, which allows us to be optimistic about the new stage that begins today”.