Start-ups played an important role at the CTI Medtech Event yesterday. Young companies received the awards and their challenges were discussed at the panel discussion.
Stefan Weber (University of Bern) and Matthias Peterhans (CAScination AG) were presented the CTI Medtech Award in the shape of a trophy of quartzite stone from Vals and a cheque for 10’000 francs by CTI Director Klara Sekanina. Their project was selected from among three nominated projects by the audience of experts from the fields of research and industry.
CAScination: Navigation through organs
A miniaturised light source and a camera are all that are needed to make bone, cartilage and ligaments in the body visible during an operation. The stomach and intestines can also be examined in this way. However, this simple imaging technology reaches its limits in solid organs with extremely branched internal vascular systems. This means that when medical technology develops a new, minimally invasive surgical technique for the brain, kidneys or the liver, it must always involve a highly complex navigation system. There are two stages to the method applied in the winning project: prior to the operation a virtual liver model is generated using raw data from CT scans. During the operation ultrasound delivers up-to-date images from inside the organ. In addition, a stereo infrared camera records the position of the instruments. "The technical challenge," says Stefan Weber, Director of ARTORG Center for Biomedical Engineering at the University of Bern, "is to integrate the different images." Thanks to CTI funding he was able to push on with the project together with Matthias Peterhans, his former doctoral student and the current CEO of CAScination: the maximum deviation between the 3D visualisation generated and the ultrasound images is now less than 0.5 millimetres. The advantage compared to traditional invasive methods is clear: the quota of operable patients is far higher. Only one in five patients with metastases can be operated on using invasive methods.
Like for the Medtech Award for the best Poster award three finalists were presented. In this case start-ups were involved in all projects. The projects of Virtamed and ETH Zurich, Sanovation and University of Zurich and Compliant Concept and EMPA made it to the finals. The award worth CHF 5’000 went to Virtamed and ETH Zurich.
Challenges for medtech start-ups
Receiving awards is of course nice for start-ups but to build up a medtech company is also very challenging. Those challenges were discussed by five industry insiders in the panel discussion. They made also suggestion how to cope with those challenges. But it became clear that it’s not easy to find solutions. One important issue in this regard was risk. Martin Horst, CEO of the start-up MyoPowers and CTI Startup Coach said that the “Valley of death” for start-ups is getting longer and longer. In a very early phase start-up projects can get support from the government and foundations (so-called soft money) and in a later stage they can attract investors. But the phase in between is getting longer because the investors invest later and later. Horst suggested a longer support by CTI for the companies as a solution or a special CTI fund investing before investors do. “I am convinced that CTI will earn some money with such a fund”, Horst said.
Gàbor Székely, Head of CTI Medtech, commented that the public partner cannot take all the risk of building up a start-up. The risk should be distributed fairly between the several partners involved. Erich Reinhardt, key note speaker at the event and Chairman of the German Medical Valley Region around Nürnberg, confirmed that in his experience investors are risk averse. “Investors are interested in Health Care but they invest only in older companies”, he said. In his view this is not easy to change because not only the financial industry is risk averse these days but also individuals looking for investment opportunities.
Early stage financing was not the only challenge mentioned in the discussion. The participants spoke about reimbursement, finding employees and getting in contact with big companies in the industry. Although those challenges are not easy to manage it became clear that the team of a start-up is a very important success factor. Martin Horst stressed the importance of experienced team members. For example for his company MyoPowers it is not so hard to get in touch with big players in the industry because the start-up hired team members who had worked for those companies and have excellent contacts.
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