Visionary Swedish innovators among the EIT Awards winners

Stockholm3 Test awarded best innovation and Multi-mode was ranked fourth of the EIT Innovation awards

Martin Steinberg from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden won the EIT Innovators Award for an innovative cancer-detecting blood test. His project STHLM3 has been described as absolutely inspiring. Another EIT Health entry for the EIT Awards was Scandinavian Shireen Sindi, representing the Multi-mode project, an eHealth tool for dementia risk prediction that was a runner-up for an award. The two are pictured above at the INNOVEIT, where they received the recognition.

Europe’s most ground-breaking entrepreneurs and innovators were honored at the EIT Awards ceremony at INNOVEIT, one of Europe’s most important innovation forums, held in Budapest on 16-17 October 2017.

Tibor Navracsics, Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, said: “The winners of this year’s EIT Awards are absolutely inspiring. The EIT Community and the EIT Awards show how many young Europeans have the talent, creativity and determination to help us tackle the big challenges facing our continent. The EIT is vital in offering young people the chance to transform their best ideas into products, services and jobs. To promote more innovators like these, Europe has to better integrate entrepreneurship and innovation into education – that’s exactly what the EIT Community does.”

EIT Innovators Award – recognises innovation teams developing a product or service with a high potential for societal and economic impact.

The winner, Martin Steinberg (from Sweden, pictured on left), is a Project Leader at the Karolinska Institute, for the Stockholm3 Test (STHLM3), an innovative cancer-detecting blood test. The test detects the risk of aggressive prostate cancer by combining five protein markers, more than 100 genetic markers, clinical data and a proprietary algorithm. Developed with the support of EIT Health, this non-invasive blood test reduces the number of unnecessary biopsies by 50% compared to current clinical practice.

He has been awarded €50,000.

“All the members of the STHLM3 team hope our work will have a significant positive impact on society, by reducing individual harm from over-diagnosis, mortality and overall healthcare costs. Most importantly, aggressive cancers will be detected early in more men, giving them a greater chance of survival. EIT Health has been a catalyst for this project, and for the close collaboration between academia, industry and healthcare providers we needed for testing, validation and market access,” said Martin Steinberg.

EIT Health’s fourth entry into the EIT Awards was EIT Health Innovation project Multi-Mode, which was the runner-up for the EIT Innovators Awards. The project develops and commercializes an evidence-based eHealth tool for dementia risk prediction in various at-risk populations and for encouraging a multidomain lifestyle intervention to prevent cognitive decline and postpone dementia onset. Shireen Sindi represented the project.

EIT Health Partners involved in this project are:

●Karolinska Institutet (lead partner)

●Erasmus University Medical Centre Rotterdam

●Imperial College London

●Parc Sanitari Sant Joan de Deu

●Research Institutes of Sweden