The competitiveness clusters of Lyonbiopôle, Minalogic, Plastipolis and I-CARE are partners on the European project Health2CARE. They recently announced their support to 4 promising projects focusing on personalised health.
Playing the interdisciplinarity card to innovate
The Health2CARE project is being jointly funded by the members of the European Union from 2014 to 2016. It gathers technological sectors in the Rhône-Alpes region such as biotechnologies, medical devices, plastics processing, microtechnologies, software, etc. It aims to explore new value chains with an “open innovation” approach surrounding personalised health. Poles and clusters that are involved in the initiative play a major part to encourage interdisciplinarity in this emerging sector,as well as to reinforce the competitiveness between companies. This is especially true for SMEs.
The Rhône-Alpes region coordinates this European project and confirms the importance of collaborative work between regional poles and clusters: “The Health2CARE initiative is completely integrated in our regional innovation strategy. Indeed, it aims to develop cross-fertilisation between sectors of emerging industries, such as personalised health.
Thus, the consortium has launched a Call for Interest in June 2014 for the rise of innovative interdisciplinary solutions that may answer the challenges of the sector.
The most promising projects were then selected by a commitee of 8 European experts from 5 different countries (Italy, Germany, England, Belgium, Switzerland) that embody the different skills used for Health2CARE (biotech, medtech, e-health, microtechnologies and materials).
Rhône-Alpes SMEs on the road to personalised health
The European experts singled out 11 Rhône-Alpes SMEs that mainly work on diagnosis solutions, medical devices or software solutions in order to improve follow-up of patients who suffer from chronic diseases.
Four of them (Kowok Theragnostic, Neolys Diagnostics, Avalun et VOICE) develop a project which mainly deals with the issues of personalised health. They received an “innovation voucher”: an envelop which contains from 5.000 to 10.000 euros to get support from an outside European firm. This support will allow them to get advice to develop their project on reglementary aspects as well as business and/or international development. A second Call for Interest will be launched at the beginning of year 2015 to select new interdisciplinary solutions.
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