The Basque bio-tech company Innoprot has been awarded the Gaztedi Prize at the Bizkaia Ekinez business awards ceremony, organised by DEMA, the agency for business creation and development that is part of the Department of Employment and Training in the Regional Government of Bizkaia.

This prize is given in recognition of young entrepreneurs who have set up projects and run them for one or two years and who have reached excellent levels of growth and job creation. The other finalists in the ‘Gaztedi’ category were the business innovation consultancy Manah-Mana and Urgarbi Environmental Services, which works in the public sanitation sector.

DEMA held the twentieth anniversary of its foundation on 4 June in the Euskalduna Conference Centre in Bilbao. It was presided over by the prime minister of the Regional Government, José Luis Bilbao, and the minister for Employment and Training, Eusebio Larrazabal, with nearly a thousand guests present.

Innoprot is a bio-tech company, a spin-off from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), which provides cell-based assay kits for drug discovery and development procedures. The company’s main line of work is to get these tests to identify, more quickly and efficiently, the chemical combinations that are most likely to become future pharmaceutical products.