Innovation Challenge Winners find Support from Cluster

Health competitiveness cluster Medicen Paris Region has supported four of the eight winners in the healthcare category of the second wave of the French government’s Innovation Challenge program. The four SMEs will receive in total more than €2 million ($2.3M) from Bpifrance, the French government’s investment bank, to finance their research and development projects. Overall 65 awardees were selected in this round of the publicly-funded Innovation Challenge, which forms part of the French government's investment plan, operated by ADEME (the French Environment and Energy Management Agency), Bpifrance and FranceAgriMer.

"We are always happy to help our members in becoming successful. Our ambitious strategy is to be a key driver in the innovative healthcare technologies ecosystem," said Stéphane Roques, general manager of the Medicen Paris Region competitiveness cluster. "We will reinforce and strengthen our support and assistance to healthcare start-ups in order to further accelerate the transformation of our scientific and medical resources into economic value for the French healthcare sector.”
Of the four SME’s assessed by the cluster, Metafora Biosystems, will receive €1 million ($1.13M) towards its CellMETA-analyser R&D project for a completely automated platform that can detect any type of cancer cell, also offering great potential for large-scale manufacturing. Metafora initially plans to develop the platform for early detection of liver and pancreatic cancers, followed by others such as colon cancer. “We are delighted to be one of the eight health sector winners of the Innovation Challenge and would like to express our heartfelt thanks to both the General Secretariat for Investment and Bpifrance for the trust they have placed in us. We are also grateful to the Medicen Paris Region competitiveness cluster for its support and expertise during this project,” said Vincent Petit, CEO of Metafora.

The winning cluster SME’s also included:

Incepto Medical, with its €350,000 ($396K) Augmented Radiology project to help physicians identify, access and use the best-in-class imaging AI (artificial intelligence) solutions and using these to create new applications.

CardioRenal - with a funding of €355,000 ($402K), aims to develop a more advanced version of its telemedicine solution, HomeHeart™, which enables the daily measurement of three cardiac biomarkers via a drop of capillary blood taken by the patient at home. Rheonova – MucoCE project.

Rheonova designs rheometers to be used for the measurement of biological fluids, particularly in chronic respiratory diseases. The MucoCF project, funded to the amount of €352,000 ($398K), intends to establish a predictive tool for acute episodes for use by cystic fibrosis patients.

MagIA Diagnostics, a member of the Lyonbiopole competitiveness cluster which joined Medicen Paris Region in January 2019, was also a winner of the Innovation Contest for its MagIA Dia IST project which has received a €296,000 ($335K) grant to develop a portable biological analysis device based on an innovative immunomagnetic technology.