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Awardees of the different calls for funds promoted by EIT Health Spain (Photo: Ricard Badia).
 20.12.2016

EIT Health Spain awards the best innovation and entrepreneurship projects

EIT Health Spain, the Spanish node of EIT Health –the Knowledge and Innovation Community (KIC), dedicated to healthy living and active aging and promoted by the European Institute of Technology and Innovation (EIT)– closed yesterday its first year of activity with an event at the Barcelona Science Park. With headquarters at PCB, EIT Health Spain presently brings together18 leading public and private organizations in the three areas of the innovation triangle in health: research, education and business creation.

 

The meeting, chaired by the president of the association, Jordi Alberch, brought togethe representatives of all the partners of the consortium as well as related institutions to the activity of this network.

The first part of the event consisted of various presentations addressed to the preparation of the calls for Innovation, Campus and Accelerator next year. Andy Browning and Ursula Mühle, respectively Directors of Innovation and Education of EIT Health and Marco Pugliese, Director of EIT Health Spain and Spanish Coordinator of the pillar of Business Creation, presented the actions of the three strategic axes of the association – InnovationCampus and Accelerator – for the generation of activities to be included in the business plan 2018.

Then, while the partners held scheduled meetings with the three directors, the Auditorium Antoni Caparrós of the PCB hosted a series of practical sessions on how to participate in the calls which EIT Health plans to finance in 2017.

In the course of the event, the Summer School Awards 2016  were also given, as well as the prizes for the winning projects of the  Headstart 2016, Proof of Concept 2016 and Business Plan Aggregator 2016 calls, which are part of the funding initiatives of the Accelerator of EIT Health, organized by the Spanish node during 2016.
 

EIT Health awards for IBEC researchers 

The ‘Proof of Concept’ (PoC) awards reward projects and business ideas that are in stages prior to the creation of the company and projects that are participating in acceleration programs in health ‘Proof of Concept plus’ (PoC +). Eduard Torrents and Elisabeth Engel group leaders at the  Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), based a tPCB, received awards at the event. Eduard’s project, ‘Novel antimicrobial therapy‘, won first prize in the ‘PoC +’ category of EIT health Spain’s Proof of Concept (PoC +) awards, and in the ‘PoC’ category, Elisabeth won a prize for ‘Smart dressing for the treatment of chronic wound (Dermoglass), the smart dressing for the treatment of chronic wounds.

Two projects of the University of Barcelona also received aids aimed at innovative business projects and ideas in the field of health sciences.

Two students of UB , honoured with the Summer School Award 2016

Ana Rodríguez and Meritxell Ascanio, graduated students of the first promotion of the bachelor degree in Biomedical Engineering, received the Summer School Award 2016 for the project called RareCanConnect, an app that had already been awarded with the first prize of EIT Health Summer School on Rare Cancer, given in November.

EIT Health consortium set a project on rare cancer aiming to find solutions aimed at the needs of the patients with these cancers, ill people without the common diagnoses and treatments. The app RareCanConnect eenables connecting the patients with a rare cancer with the medical staff who takes care of them. The award includes the funding of the project and entrance to the accelerator of EIT Health.

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