February 2007

The President of the Government of Navarre, Miguel Sanz, the Regional Minister for Industry, José Javier Armendáriz, and the Deputy Director of the public company Sodena, Javier Berazaluce, paid a visit to Brookhaven National Laboratory, located about 100 kilometres from New York.

Although it reports to the US Energy Department, this laboratory also carries out research in the fields of nuclear safety, the environment, medicine, biology, computer systems and nanotechnology. Brookhaven is famous for its work on brain diseases and addictions and for its plans to use nanoparticles to attack tumours.

Nanotechnology is of particular interest to Navarre since the agreement reached last year with specialists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to set up a research centre in the region.

The agreement, whereby Navarre is the first Spanish region to set up a venture capital fund dedicated to nanotechnology investment, links it to one of the most prestigious companies in the world in the innovation and technological development of new materials and devices on an atomic and molecular scale (new materials which are one millionth part of a millimetre), representing a new techno-science.

Sodena’s purchase of shares in Principia will enable it to establish close links with MIT’s research environment. Furthermore, the Principia-Navarre Innovation Centre is destined to become a national benchmark and the one that coordinates relations between the prestigious MIT and all the projects carried out in Spain under the auspices of this agreement.