HomeStartups in generalJoin BIO-Europe on October 27 and tune in to the InnoStars Awards...

Join BIO-Europe on October 27 and tune in to the InnoStars Awards 2021 (Sponsored)

If you are curious about the newest healthcare inventions, we’re recommending you to join BIO-Europe’s online event on October 27th, also featuring the InnoStars Awards Grand Final 2021 of EIT Health. The event will be broadcasted live on the EIT Health InnoStars Facebook page, and will take place from 10am to 1pm CET.

  • 10:00-10:20 – Opening / EIT Health introduction
  • 10:20-10:30 – Key note speech
  • 10:30-12:15 – Startup pitches / jury Q&A
  • 12:20-12:50 – Panel discussion (main health tech investment trends in 2022)
  • 12:50-13:00 – InnoStars Awards 2021 – Award Ceremony

The EIT Health InnoStars Awards are a first-class talent competition in healthcare for startups from Central, Eastern and Southern Europe. The prestigious InnoStars Awards are aimed at micro- and small enterprises, spin-offs, and startups that have a prototype or minimum viable product but do not yet have a product or a service in the market yet.

About the Competition:

This competitive programme is for innovators who are based in – EIT Regional Innovation Scheme (RIS) – countries with moderately developed innovation capacity. This year, the startup competition saw a record number of applications.

Each team selected will receive €25,000 plus individual mentoring and the opportunity to participate in two European bootcamps. EIT Health provides selected teams with potential customers, investors, and partners to validate their product or service. After the four-month programme, 10 teams will advance to the InnoStars Awards Grand Final, where the winner will receive an additional €25,000; the second prize is €15,000 and the third is €10,000.

And here are the 10 finalist teams of 2021:

Nanoker Research (Spain): Advanced ceramics show unique intrinsic properties for biomedical applications, thanks to which the global medical ceramics market is growing fast (expected US$ 24 Bn by 2025). Nanoker entered this market since its very incorporation (coloured CADCAM blanks) and, since 2017, the company’s growth focus pivoted to the dental implants market with NACRE, an all ceramic nanocomposite, disruptive, root-form, versatile monoblock implant that has already shown extremely good performance under real conditions, and is set to hit the market in 1H 2022 upon completion of CE/MDR marking by IMQ Italian MDR adapted.

Theresa Kit (Hungary): Increasing population is suffering from inflammatory diseases and gold-standard small molecule immunomodulatory therapies turn out to be ineffective for about 30% of patients within 1 year of treatment initiation. Early identification of non-responders by means of a diagnostic test is crucial to avoid ineffective therapies. Theresa kit is a precision diagnostic tool for quantifying patients’ inherent risk for observing therapeutic resistance driven by the activity of multidrug transporter (MDR) proteins. Scientists at Navolab Diagnostics believe that applying Theresa kit in the diagnostic panel of patients with inflammatory disorders like pneumonia or IBD makes their medical care more patient centric and renders it highly cost-effective.

PhotoBioCure (Poland): Surgical repair of hernias is one of the most commonly performed operations worldwide. Physicians typically use synthetic meshes which often cause adverse events like chronic pain, scar tissues. Meshes must be customized prior implantation and sutured during the procedure. Their PhotoBioCure technology revolutionizes the process. The startup also develops injectable patches which form customized implants in situ in vivo. Once injected material is cured with safe UV light and forms flexible patch. The procedure is simple and no sutures are needed. The patch slowly degrades in time and is replaced by natural tissue. PhotoBioCure completed preclinical studies and are starting first-in-man trials.

APPERCELL (Hungary): An increasing amount of people is suffering from neurodegenerative and heart diseases. Close to 90% of all new drugs fail in clinical trials driven by that animal testing may not be conclusive in human applications. This costs USD billions and several patient years for a new drug to be developed. APPERCELL’s goal is to revolutionise biomedical research and drug development by commercialising a high-throughput microelectrode array system with automated data analysis platform, which enables faster, safer and more efficient drug discovery, while minimising the need for live animal experiments. The company’s mission is to make people lives better. They also wish to set a role model for the regional bio/medtech community and grow with the local talent.

Neurosalience (Estonia): The healthtech startup Neurosalience develops a tool for early detection of dementia from MRI scans. The innovative tool allows to decrease patient-related costs and improve the quality of life of patients. The Neurosalience tool is the first in the world to be capable of processing even low resolution MRI data from older scanners with potential extension to CT scans which are cheap and widely available.

T-Control (Spain): Gold standard urinary catheters resolve a basic problem, but immediately create new ones for all stakeholders. T-Control is the first and only catheter with a built-in fluid controlling system, that enables us to control the urine-flow always covering unmet needs like preventing infection in a multifactorial way, reduction of contamination with body fluids by the healthcare staff, and improvement of the quality of life of the patient, by allowing them to void into a normal toilet instead of the urine bag.

Tully (Romania): The solution is helping people with complex conditions live better by improving the way they recognize, manage and deal with their emotions. Their vision is to ultimately create a full range automated psychological support for sensory integration disorders, from specific (ADHD, Bipolar disorder, Autism) to general conditions, like anxiety or depression. Tully starts by focusing on children ADHD, for whom emotional meltdowns have significant effects, from learning difficulties, parental stress and social rejection to increased risks of substance abuse, extensive comorbidities, criminal behavior incarceration in adulthood and even a reduction in life expectancy.

E-Chem® (Portugal): ENDOBIOS E-Chem® technology is a B-to-B platform that discovers health-benefiting value chains in undervalued commercialized bioproducts or nonmonetized biowaste from algae, microbes, or plants. Attribution of health-meaningful bioactivity to the rare/unique natural products is done directly in extracts by chemical fingerprinting and database-matching, and then exploring their known bioactivities in the scientific literature. With one drop of extract, their customer-tailored E-Chem® raises the value of bioproducts and provides new solutions to end customers seeking over-the-counter therapeutics that prevent disease and improve health, mostly as nutraceuticals, immunostimulants, microbiome health, antiaging, skin health or wellbeing products.

J.E.M. Tech (Italy): It is common to say that “the heart is a pump” but it is extremely hard to investigate “how this pump works” especially during the different phases of the surgery. Currently the heart mechanics is assessed mainly visually by surgeons and the only technology widely used in the operating room to help the evaluation is the Transesophageal Echocardiography containing several limitations: J.E.M. Tech aims to overcome these above-mentioned problems with the Videocardiograph (VCG): a non-invasive clinical device based on a single 3D camera and an A.I. software able to quantitatively assess the mechanical function of the heart in real-time.

LEDD (Romania): AIMED promotes a new, non-invasive, low cost, accessible, fast alternative solution for lung cancer(LC) and pulmonary fibrosis differential diagnostic -LEDD- based on transthoracic ultrasound (US) image processing and artificial intelligence algorithms, which can also be used in follow-up and for biopsy guidance. Currently lung cancer diagnosis protocol is mostly invasive, involving computer tomography (CT), blood samples and tissue samples with high costs per new case, high diagnosis time and low monitoring frequency and accessibility. LC is a leading cause of mortality and fibrosis is also secondary to COVID-19. Their team is working together for 3 years now, composed of tech and medical specialists with more than 20 years of experience in lung US.

If you are curious to see those emerging health tech stars pitching, make sure to tune in live on the EIT Health InnoStars Facebook page on October 27th.

Thomas Ohr
Thomas Ohr
Thomas Ohr is the "Editor in Chief" of EU-Startups.com and started the blog in October 2010. He is excited about Europe's future, passionate about new business ideas and lives in Barcelona (Spain).
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