Rais of Tatarstan Rustam Minnikhanov met with university rectors at year-end discussion
The participants reviewed the results of joint work in 2025 and set priorities for 2026, with a focus on accelerating the delivery of research outcomes into industry and the wider economy.
Rector of KFU Lenar Safin, speaking as chair of the Council of Rectors of Tatarstan, said universities are increasingly expected to concentrate on producing innovation and scaling technology entrepreneurship.
“Universities in the Republic must also take responsibility for turning technology entrepreneurship into a repeatable, scalable activity,” Safin said. “This can only be achieved through transforming the university management system, which must be based on the introduction of project-, product-, and investment-driven logic.”
Safin said KFU has launched dedicated technological leadership project offices with major partners, including Gazprombank, SIBUR, Izvarino Pharma, and Gazprom Neft. He argued that building a new industrial-era innovation pipeline requires costly shared infrastructure—and that universities, development institutions, and industry should build an integrated ecosystem to support serial technological entrepreneurship.
KFU’s strategy under Russia’s Priority 2030 university development program is built around three strategic projects. The projects were recently presented to the federal council that oversees grant support for such programs at the Ministry of Science and Higher Education.
Providing a recent example from the project on unconventional hydrocarbon resources, Safin said KFU had won a tender worth more than 600,000 US dollars for pilot trials in Vietnam using reagents developed by university researchers. He said the university outperformed competitors from France, South Africa, and other countries.
On advanced materials and chemistry, Safin invited leaders of Priority 2030 universities to visit KFU’s Catalyst Factory in Stolbishche, a suburb of Kazan, during 2026 Russian Science Day. The initiative, implemented jointly with SIBUR, is aimed at full import substitution of key components in the area.
In biomedicine, Safin said KFU has begun a project to organize industrial-scale production of viral vectors for the university clinic and under an order from the Moscow Department of Health. He added that KFU has been allocated three floors at the Moscow Center for Innovative Technologies in Healthcare on Vernadsky Avenue, and that the university expects some full treatment courses to be significantly cheaper than existing global equivalents.
KFU also plans to establish a center cell technology implementation in oncology treatment at its University Clinic. “We are not merely implementing a program,” he said. “We are shaping a new model of universities as full-cycle innovation conveyor belts, in order to make a meaningful contribution to achieving our country’s technological independence.”