Health-Ties to boost health tech
- 11 October 2010
Europe’s most advanced regions in healthcare technology have launched a consortium to increase and accelerate healthcare innovation.
The Health-Ties consortium, which is supported by a three year grant from the European Commission, has been set up to strengthen the research potential of European regions through encouraging research driven clusters of universities, research centres, companies and regional authorities.
The consortium is made up of five countries including Medical Delta from the Netherlands, Life Sciences Zurich from Switzerland, Oxford and Thames Valley from the UK, BioCat from Catalonia and Észak-Alföld from Hungary.
It combines Europe’s top regions in biosciences, medical technology and health entrepreneurship in order to form a more collaborative approach to major innovations, which the European Commission hopes will arise from clusters of investors and research organisations that are willing to try new things.
The consortia will map what is needed to speed up the transfer of idea-to-product and analyse regional R&D needs and will focus on four major disease areas: cardiovascular diseases, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases and infectious disease.
In addition, it will involve medical doctors and patients group in the development of the new technologies and will share innovations with other EU regions.
Last week, the European Commission announced that it had set up an Innovation Union, one of the aims of which was to form a series of innovation partnerships to help mobilise stakeholders.
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