A total of 11 projects led by entrepreneurs from 4 European countries (Spain, France, Ireland and United Kingdom) have been chosen to participate in the 3rd edition of CRAASH Barcelona, the acceleration program Biocat organizes in collaboration with CIMIT (Boston), which is part of the bootcamp programs run by EIT Health.
This year, CRAASH Barcelona received 20% more applications than in 2019: a total of 78 projects from 21 countries applied to take part in the 3rd edition of the program, which is geared towards projects with cutting-edge technology (diagnostics, medical devices and digital health) that come out of European research centers, hospital research institutes and universities. "Every year we are seeing more and more innovative and quality projects applying to participate in the CRAASH Barcelona acceleration program. The teams selected for this edition have great potential to change people's lives", said John Collins, Chief Operating Officer at the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT).
The 11 projects chosen to participate in CRAASH Barcelona this year are:
- AiiNTENSE: ICUs face several challenges such as the complexity of pathologies with neurological complications, the traceability of medical decisions, a lack of interoperability and quality of health data that hampers the effectiveness of research projects. This project is developing a solution allowing access to patient health data in order to improve the quality of medical decisions and facilitate research projects.
- Anais Medical: Vascular Access (VA) procedures, required for haemodialysis, are complex and involve several disciplines and fragile patients. Training is crucial to minimize patient risks, but current training systems are considered to be unrealistic and inefficient so it is often done with direct practice. This project offers a complete toolkit for VA care with highly realistic simulators that allow practicing multiple VA techniques.
- Angiotheragnostics: This project presents a novel strategy to treat and avoid anti-angiogenic resistance. The asset is a new plasma biomarker of patient selection that identifies which patient will be a candidate to receive a drug that can block and prevent resistance, and thus this dual strategy will allow the delivery of more efficacious and safer therapies to patients.
- Keycatch: This project focuses on the development and validation of a new biosensor device platform for a broad range of applications. As a proof-of-principle, it plans to create and validate several devices for heavy metals detection and quantification, along with a detector of V cholerae, responsible for cholera disease. These devices would be optimal for rapid in situ and inexpensive detection without the need of lab facilities.
- Mch20: Liver pathologies are considered a worlwide epidemy (25% prevalence) and their managing presents a challenge, as routine methods are not enough to stratify patients. To overcome it, Mch20 will allow determining liver damage through a urine sample in a cost-effective and user-friendly way. The test will be performed at home, making liver tests more accessible and improving patient stratification.
- Medwise.ai: This project is building an AI platform that could retrieve knowledge from clinical guidelines and journal articles to answer questions asked by clinicians. This can improve search time from 15 minutes per query to within seconds and save up to an hour per clinician per day. Ultimately, the project aims to improve adoption of evidence based medicine, reduce unwarranted variation in care and improve patient outcome. A Covid-19 specific version of the project has recently been launched for clinicians: www.medwise.ai/covid .
- My gut solution: The low FODMAP diet is the most effective dietary intervention for IBS. The microbiome is believed to be central to the severity of the symptoms. This project has a video-based dietetic programme that helps people manage their IBS. With phenotypic, microbiome data and machine learning, it wants to identify the algorithms for the best treatment options and deliver personalized interventions.
- Myosleeve: The first smart forearm medical device based on High-Density Electromyography that provides real-time guidance and monitoring of the patient during the rehabilitation of epicondylitis (tennis elbow), allowing to personalize the treatment for each patient.
- NewClin: Half the world lacks access to health services and it will worsen with the expected worldwide net shortage of 15 million health workers by 2030. NewClin develops a language- and AI-driven free mobile app to transform everyone’s access to health services and to generate real-world evidence data for the development of new health products and services.
- TMP-EIT Health: An internal EIT Health project to develop a services platform within EIT Health ecosystem.
- Virtual Hearts: Pre-clinical trials are seldom conclusive; human trials are costly and take a very long time to complete and carry substantial business and patient risks. Using virtual patients’ populations, this supercomputer-based in-silico trials platform enables cardiac device manufacturers to safely test high-risk implantable devices before starting human trials.
From lab to market in 3-5 years
CRAASH Barcelona will train these selected projects to market their technology within the next 3 to 5 years. The fellows will be guided by expert mentors from CIMIT (Boston), the most experienced health accelerator in the world and 8 European experts in the healthcare sector.
CRAASH Barcelona is an intensive 12-week program divided into three phases. The first phase will allow teams to validate whether their technology can cover a real need and find a place on the market. Teams will work with experts from CIMIT in Boston, first through virtual meetings ant later in person at an event in Barcelona.
The second and third phases of CRAASH Barcelona will allow teams validate their project in some of the best health ecosystems in USA (Boston) and Europe (Galway and other important European cities).
CRAASH Barcelona has partnerships with Institut Català de la Salut, NUI Galway and Medicen (París), and BCN Tech City and Movistar Centre as event partners.
