News

On 5 February, the first 2024 online plenary meeting of the Smart Health Pilot was held and aimed at setting the basis for the annual activities to be carried out to support the pilot’s long-term objective : Accelerating the implementation of Personalised Medicine across Europe.

For 2024, the Smart Health pilot has reinforced its ambitions in terms of impact generation. Especially, the pilot will ensure a better knowledge and an easier access to funding to its members. A structured and systematic monitoring process will be implemented for relevant funding opportunities, such as I3, RIV-EIE, Euroclusters, ERA4Health, among others. Relevant opportunities will be shared with pilot members via a regular newsletter. At the Pilot level, a dedicated support on investment project’s preparation will also be set up to optimise members’ projects proposals’ preparation.

The pilot will also continue facilitating activities and synergies with other Vanguard Initiative’s Pilots, especially by encouraging cross-pilots funding applications and sharing pilot’s progress updates, best practices and collaboration opportunities during Vanguard-level events.

The Pilot will further leverage new tools and instruments available at the Vanguard level, especially when it comes to achieving its new objective for 2024 : Growing the visibility of SMEs in the Pilot’s ecosystem. To support SMEs, the pilot will strongly encourage its member regions to apply to VInnovate calls – the brand new funding instrument of Vanguard Initiative. VInnovate and its timeline, scope, eligibility criteria, etc. was presented to Smart Health members during the plenary meeting. In addition, the implementation at the Vanguard level of the Gateway tool, that has already shown great success with the 3DP Pilot, should significantly increase the visibility of SMEs. Indeed, the tool will facilitate the set-up of sustainable connections between cross-sectoral organisations and ensure a better access to funding opportunities.

When it comes pilot’s demo cases, great progress has been made in each of the 5 demo cases in their respective fields and new uses cases and initiatives are being developed across Europe. In particular, Imago-Mol cluster, that develop the ‘Trace Med’ demo case, is one of the founder members of the MEDIC-NEST project, recently transformed into the MEDIC-NEST meta cluster. This initiative is an alliance of European clusters and business supporting organisations that facilitates cross border and cross sectoral collaboration in terms of internationalisation, growth and global competitiveness of the European Precision Medicine Ecosystem.

The Flemish-Dutch demo case for regenerative medicine, RegMed XB,  has just received a 15M€ funding from the Flanders Regions to set up two research programs with a cross-border management structure.

The first VI Smart Health online plenary meeting was also the opportunity to welcome Biocat (Bioregion cluster ) on behalf of the Catalonia Region, and to hear about its dynamic health innovation’s ecosystem. Through Biocat, Catalonia will be an observer in the Pilot for 2024. Biocat has already 3 ideas for a new Smart Health pilot’s demo case in the fields of health innovation guidance & access to market, devices to reduce the burden of stroke and bioproduction. Follow-up discussions will be held with Biocat and co-leading regions and later with pilot members, to set up an interesting demo case project and identify partnership opportunities.

Finally, the pilot continue to closely collaborate with EP PerMed, especially by encouraging its members to apply to its first Joint Transnational Call 2024 call on the “Identification or Validation of Targets for Personalised Medicine Approaches”.

The Smart Health Pilot warmly thanks all the participants and speakers for this very rich plenary meeting, announcing a fruitful year 2024!