VIV HEALTHTECH: Health goes fully digital in Nouvelle Aquitaine

With support from partners including Bordeaux University Hospital, the CNRS and the start-up Nurea, a total of six Inria researchers from the Memphis, Potioc, Flowers, Carmen, Monc and Geostat project teams took part in the event, a level of involvement that reflects the institute’s total commitment to issues surrounding innovation in digital health. The aim was also to address the technological, economic and societal challenges raised in the health sector, helping to showcase the diversity of projects the researchers are involved in, alongside entrepreneurs and doctors from the Nouvelle Aquitaine region. 

Yves Coudière, who is head of the Carmen project team and  and Nejib Zemzemi researcher within the same team, both members of the ViV HealthTech steering committee for Viv HealthTech, oversaw the involvement of the Inria Bordeaux - Sud-Ouest research centre in this unique event. 

 

© Inria / Photo H. Raguet

This was the first time I had organised an event of this kind and on this sort of scale.  I was really impressed by the number and the diversity of the partners involved in this organisation. It was sometimes quite intimidating, actually.

"I feel that this shows the richness and dynamism of the region when it comes to innovation in health. At a personal level, I put a lot of time into it, but I also learned a lot by observing up close and helping to coordinate highly varied entities, such as research centres, business hubs, competitive clusters, healthcare personnel associations, etc" explains Yves Coudière.

The event was set up to bring together a range of different stakeholders from the health tech sector and to help new projects to emerge. Conceived as a platform for promoting communication between professionals from the medical sphere, ViV HealthTech brought together more than 80 speakers, addressing four main themes: prevention and care pathways; laboratories and medicines; connected health; and medical devices and materials. More than 750 participants from the business world, academia, industry and the world of health in Nouvelle Aquitaine took part in the event.

© Inria / Photo H. Raguet

Nejib Zemzemi, who was also one of the speakers, looks back on his involvement: "Inria's participation in Viv HealthTech germinated during the first phase of lockdown. It was a bit difficult to plan ahead and engage the institute's participation without knowing what format the event would take. But we were determined to meet the challenge, confident that the event would take the right format.
Personally, I wanted to show the collaborations that different Inria teams have with medical startuppers and healthcare professionals, in particular with our collaborators from the Bordeaux University Hospital"

 

This echoes Inria's desire to assert itself as a fully-fledged player in the regional health research and transfer ecosystem. Considering the interactions we have had and the success of the event, I believe that the goal has been achieved.

Whether it’s making diagnoses, analysing results, optimising and personalising treatments or screening molecules for their biological activity - over the course of the past fifteen or so years, the use of digital technology on complex medical data has revolutionised the processing of health data, with a whole host of potential benefits for both patients and healthcare personnel.  Within Inria, there are a significant number of interdisciplinary research projects linked to health and biology, opening up promising avenues for the entire healthcare chain, including the R&D departments of major groups working on medications, devices, regulatory bodies and a range of other themes.