Oslo Cancer Cluster's General Manager Ketil Widerberg at the EHiN conference in 2018.

The e-health meeting place

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Oslo Cancer Cluster will co-power the conference E-health in Norway (EHiN).

– This is a natural continuation of the work we do in digitalisation, for a better understanding of cancer and better patient treatment, said Ketil Widerberg, General Manager of Oslo Cancer Cluster, at EHiN 2018.

The Norwegian Ministry of Health and Care Services (HOD) and ICT Norway started a collaboration on creating a national meeting place for e-health. ICT Norway launched the first EHiN conference five years ago. Oslo Cancer Cluster is happy to announce that we are now one of the three stakeholders in this yearly conference, together with ICT Norway and Macsimum.

EHiN attracts a large audience from Norwegian government and business. The speaker in this picture is Christine Bergland, Director at the Norwegian Directorate of eHealth (NDE).

Norwegian e-health  
EHiN 2018 took place in Oslo Spektrum and was the biggest meeting place for actors in the public and private sector working with e-health in Norway. The conference had 150 speakers and 1300 participants. EHiN 2019 will be the 6th year of the conference.

What happened at EHiN 2018?

 — EHiN is an important meeting place for public and private actors, and for academia and business. This is a natural prolongation of the many meeting places Oslo Cancer Cluster is always working to establish and preserve, Ketil Widerberg says.

Digital technologies are part of what drives innovation to the maximum benefit of cancer patients. Widerberg is certain that e-health will change the way we understand and treat cancer in the future.

– E-health is part of the matrix for how we give the right medicine to the right patient at the right time, meaning precision medicine. One example of what we specifically do in this area, is a recent project we have been part of, called PERMIDES.

An e-health success story
From August 2016 until August 2018, Oslo Cancer Cluster together with five other European clusters in medicine and ICT, was managing a Horizon 2020 EU project called PERMIDES. It is a European e-health success story in bringing together biopharma and IT sectors.

D.B.R.K Gupta Udatha at the EHiN conference in 2018. Dr. Udatha was the project manager for PERMIDES at Oslo Cancer Cluster.

D.B.R.K Gupta Udatha is Director (Digital and EU) at Oslo Cancer Cluster. He has been instrumental in PERMIDES and explains why the project has had such a positive effect on the small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) it has worked with. 

— PERMIDES was a project to anchorage digital transformation across SMEs in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. We aimed to see where the biopharma companies were lacking digital infrastructure and where the ICT companies could bring digital skills to make sure that the biopharma companies were up to date, Dr. Udatha said at EHiN 2018.

The project created matchmaking opportunities between these two different categories of companies and was awarded EUR 4.8 million from the EU’s Horizon2020 programme. It addressed specific challenges for SMEs to go digital with a precision medicine product.

Read more bout the PERMIDES project here.

Biotech Embrace IT Knowledge

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— We have succeeded in bringing more IT knowledge to the Biotech world, says Project Manager of PERMIDES D.B.R.K. Gupta Udatha.

 

Merging IT and Biotech
Together with five European clusters, Oslo Cancer Cluster have been managing a Horizon 2020 EU project “PERMIDES”. The cluster-to-cluster projects main goal was to stimulate collaboration between biotech companies and IT companies, in the end to create more innovative and personalized cancer treatments.

The total volume of what the project has managed to achieve makes it a success, Gupta Udatha believes.

— The IT sector is developing fast. We now have tools like Big Data, Machine Learning, Blockchain and more. All this can be amazingly helpful for a Biotech company if they get help understanding the technology. This is what PERMIDES has provided! On a more basic level we have freed Bio-businesses from the clutching grasp of excel sheets and presented more effective computer solutions.

Results and Speed
And the program has provided an abundance of results.

  • PERMIDES supported 88 Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) of the bio-pharmaceutical sector from 18 European countries
  • 119 grant applications have been submitted for innovation projects
  • 51 are funded for a total of € 2.65 M.

Furthermore, biopharma SMEs in need of consultancy services could apply for consultancy vouchers, each amounting to a maximum of 5,000 Euros. From a total of 91 applications, 41 are now financially supported by consultancy vouchers with a total funding volume of 261,000 Euros.

Another successful part of PERMIDES is how effective it has been

— Speed is a key factor of PERMIDES, which funds innovation projects for a maximum of half a year. The success of PERMIDES is further supported by the comparatively short review process of a maximum of three months between application submission and funding commitment, says Gupta Udatha.

Full Overview
If you want to take a closer look at what the PERMIDES project has achieved, check their brand new database.

— There you will not only find extensive information about the projects, but also about the project partners. Take a look at this information source and see for yourself the innovative solutions of European SMEs. Currently the projects of the first cut-off date are available. In the next few weeks, we will also add the projects of the second cut-off date and publish the Consultancy Voucher projects, says Gupta Udatha.

PERMIDES database.

For funded bio-pharmaceutical companies, there is still the possibility until mid of 2018 to receive a follow-up coaching by the PERMIDES team. The coaching includes, for example, information about further funding opportunities, support in applying for additional funding or further networking with companies and research institutions from the IT industry.

Funding Innovation in BioPharma and IT

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What kind of work does it take to receive PERMIDES funding for innovative concepts and projects? Meet one of the companies that just received funding. 

 

22 collaboration projects will receive a total of 1,25 Million Euros from PERMIDES for innovation projects between small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) from biopharma, bioinformatics and the IT sector. 

One of the lucky companies to receive innovation funding is Oslo Cancer Cluster member Myhere. For MyHere, it was especially important that the PERMIDES initiative is focused on the intersection between BioPharma and IT.

– Working with partners that are specialized in our field makes it easier to communicate the mission we are on, the concrete problems we are trying to solve and to qualify if we are a good match for each other or not. Furthermore, as we learned about the people and companies involved with PERMIDES, we discovered that we could learn a lot from the experiences of other SMEs in the program, says Jon-Bendik Thue, CEO at MyHere.

An innovative health app
MyHere’s mission is mainly carried out through the use of their app. This app, which pinpoints levels of Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) in the bloodstream, enables a clearer outlook on potential prostate cancer and when to promptly, and timely, seek help. Thus, this app creates a balanced overview of prostate cancer that can save the patient and doctor from underdoing and overdoing the process. Essentially, the app is designed to save lives.

In this video, from MyHere’s webpage, the company explains the concept:

Essential health data
The funding will enable MyHere to start with a project that manages content from owners of health data. Health data is a tremendous resource, but unfortunately also tremendously underutilized. One important factor is the issue with getting consent from the owner of health data for research purposes. Typically, the owner is the individual the information was generated from, often in the role as a patient.

– As a provider of medical services directly to consumers, while at the same time organizing data across patient journeys, we are in a unique position to help solve the issue with consent for use of data. The funding from PERMIDES will allow us to build a dynamic data owner content management system, that will be integrated into our medical service platform. We are very excited about this project and we look forward to implementing it with our partner FramX, says Thue.

– Without this funding, we would have had to postpone the initiative without knowing when we would be able to realize it. Now we are thrilled that we will be able to hit the ground running right after the short Norwegian summer, he adds.

More winners in this round
Another Oslo Cancer Cluster member that got funding in this PERMIDES call is Arctic Pharma, a small start-up company committed to developing innovative anti-cancer drugs by exploiting the peculiar metabolic features of cancer cells.

These two Oslo Cancer Cluster members were among six Norwegian companies involved in four successful applications for Innovation Voucher funding. All of them will be able to initiate their joint projects in August and expect to see results early next year.

 

Helping biotech companies through innovative IT solutions

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The cluster-to-cluster project PERMIDES stimulates collaboration between biotech companies and IT companies. Its goal is to develop more innovative, personalized cancer treatments.

 

Oslo Cancer Cluster is currently involved in a big European collaboration through the cluster-to-cluster project PERMIDES.

24 May you can benefit from the project by joining the BIOMED INFORMATICS workshop in Oslo. This workshop brings together small and medium sized companies from the biopharma/medtech and IT sectors. (See the sidebar for more info on this event.)

PERMIDES aims to utilize novel IT-solutions to accelerate drug development in biotech companies. Biotechs and the healthcare sector generally lag in using IT in their everyday work.


Can get better at IT
“I know of companies who still manage their clinical trial studies using Excel. This is not a good idea. An Excel sheet may only hold a limited amount of data before it crashes and you lose everything”, says Gupta Udatha.

Udatha is the PERMIDES project leader in Norway. He divides his time between Oslo and Halden, where the NCE Smart Energy Markets-cluster is situated. This cluster is mainly involved in IT. Other clusters participating in the project are from Austria and Germany.


Ambitious goals for next year
Before PERMIDES ends in 2018, it aims to have reached some ambitious goals:

  • 90 innovation projects between IT and biotechs will have received funding through a voucher system
  • 120 IT companies and biotech companies will have benefited from technology transfer activities
  • 75 enterprises will have participated in networking conferences at both regional and European levels
  • 100 companies will have placed their profile in a semantic matchmaking portal: the PERMIDES platform


Find your ideal match
The PERMIDES platform is designed to match IT-companies and biotech companies. As a supplementary service, Gupta Udatha and others involved in PERMIDES are currently busy arranging matchmaking events all over Europe. They try to find the perfect match between IT- and biotech companies interested in collaborating on projects on personalized medical treatment.

Through PERMIDES voucher funding, a biotech company can avail services for up to 60 000 Euros from an IT-company. This gives them a market advantage in digitalizing their processes.

“The health care and biopharma sectors must understand that new IT solutions are the way forward. Tasks which a company may spend weeks and months doing, may easily be done by a few smart IT-solutions, in just few clicks, says Udatha.


Pursuing new EU-programs
PERMIDES is the first EU-project Oslo Cancer Cluster is involved in, but it will not be the last. Oslo Cancer Cluster is actively seeking new EU-projects to apply for.

This year, Oslo Cancer Cluster and Oslo Medtech, another health cluster in Norway, are looking into new EU-projects to apply for together. They have received support from the Norwegian Research Council, that wants more Norwegian institutions and companies to get involved in EU-projects.

“Hopefully, we will have landed ten new EU-project applications by 2019”, says Udatha.

 

What PERMIDES is

  • Stands for Personalized Medicine Innovation through Digital Enterprise Solutions
  • The project is for European small and medium sized enterprises in biotech and IT
  • The aim is to strengthen the competitiveness and foster the innovation potential of personalized medicine as an emerging industry in Europe
  • PERMIDES offers workshops, funding schemes and a matchmaking portal for the participating companies
  • Read more on permides.eu


Clusters involved in PERMIDES
Oslo Cancer Cluster S.A (Norway)
NCE Smart Energy Markets, c/o Smart Innovation Østfold AS (Norway)
Software-Cluster c/o CyberForum e.V. (Germany)
Cluster für Individualisierte ImmunIntervention (Ci3) e.V. (Germany)
Intelligent views GmbH (Germany)
NETSYNO Software GmbH (Germany)
Oncotyrol – Center for Personalized Cancer Medicine GmbH (Austria)
IT-Cluster – Business Upper Austria, OÖ Wirtschaftsagentur GmbH (Austria)