EIT Health Scandinavia names ten winners of Headstart funding

Start-ups and SMEs chosen from all Scandinavian regions

EIT Health Scandinavia has announced the ten winners of Scandinavian HeadStart 2018 funding, which is designed to help start-ups and SMEs develop their healthcare innovations.

• support the next steps towards the market and shorten time-to-market for innovative products and services;
• verify the need/benefit of the product/service for users/customers/payers/partners;
• increase the possibility of attracting further private investment.

The applicants chosen by EIT Health Scandinava were evaluated by high-level experts representing different Scandinavian regions.

The winning candidates have a good geographical distribution, coming from almost all EIT Health Scandinavian regions; from Uppsala to Stockholm, Region Skåne and Copenhagen. They are supported by academic, business and public Partners from a total of 30 applications from all Scandinavian regions. We are excited to see, support and welcome to the EIT Health Scandinavian family all these new health innovators in their journey to realize innovative solutions for European citizens and healthcare improvement.

The list of the winning Scandinavian companies and their projects is:

• Mindmore with the project ‘’Minemmera’’: Mindmore’s digital neurocognitive screening tool lets patients do evidence-based neurocognitive tests on a tablet at their local primary healthcare centre before referring to a specialist; given the digital nature of the tests, administrators and manual analysis are not needed in order to do a neurocogntive screening. This way clinicians can detect neurocognitive diseases earlier and the number of referrals are reduced.
• Injurymap with the project “CE-marking of screening tool for patients with muscle/joint pain’’: Injurymap helps patients find the right treatment for muscle or joint pain on their own.
• Radiobotics with the project “Faster and more accurate image diagnostics with machine learning’’: Radiobotics is automating analysis of routine x-ray images of bone and joints using state-of-the-art machine learning (AI), improving diagnostic quality and time spent at hospitals, benefiting patients, doctors and society as a whole.
• Abarceo Pharma with the project “First disease modifying durable therapy for type 2 diabetes’’: Abarceo is dedicated to developing a first-in-class treatment to address the #1 unmet need in treating type2 diabetes – reversing and preventing beta cell dysfunction – by blocking a novel diabetes target found to be over- and incorrectly expressed in beta cells of diabetes patients and believed to be the root cause of beta cell dysfunction.
• Health Support Sweden with the project “Hrmni’’: Hrmni makes a digital evaluation and communication tool that help clinicians individualize childhood obesity treatment, to make it more effective while reducing the clinical workload and perceived effort for the families.
• Pilloxa with the project “Smart pillbox with embedded sensors coupled to smartphone app”: Pilloxa is developing a smart pillbox with embedded sensors that are connected to a mobile application in order to facilitate medication for the smartphone generation. They are utilizing a B2B business model through pharma companies and starting test-bed studies in the second half of 2018 to verify our product and our business model.
• GPBio with the project “A superglue for broken bones: a revolutionary tissue repair product’’: This company is developing a superglue for bone that is so strong that surgeons can safely and successfully glue bone fragments and the shattered joints of a patient together; with a biocompatible, biomimicking material that allows immediate load-bearing, maintains the fragments in place and even accelerates healing until the patient is fully cured.
• Cavis Technologies with the project ‘’Innovative catheter’’: Cavis Technologies provides physicians with a diagnostic tool of the coronary arteries that if used reduces the risk of heart attack by 28%, and in addition has a unique feature that avoids misdiagnosis that today happen to 15% of patients.
• Emplicure with the project ‘’Ceramic based transdermal patch for management of chronic pain’’: Emplicure develops a new abuse deterrent formulation for transdermal delivery of strong opioids for chronic pain, based on ceramic materials making the treatment safer for the patients, their families and lower the risk to public health as the formulation have barriers against misuse and abuse e.g. via smoking and oral ingestion.
• Dianovator with the project “Dianovator – Smarter Insulin Dosing Decisions’’: Dianovator’s smartphone app provides individualized real-time support on insulin dosing to patients with insulin-treated diabetes, and our web portal offers analytics on interpreting diabetes data to the diabetes care team. These machine-learning based approaches may alleviate the burden of difficult treatment decisions and promote sounder glycaemic control.