On May 31, 2023, the sixth annual Demo Day of the BIH Digital Health Accelerator Program took place, bringing together a diverse group of innovative minds in the heart of Berlin. The event, hosted by the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité (BIH), showcased seven exceptional teams of Charité/BIH clinicians and researchers presenting their digital health innovations.
The event commenced with a welcome note by Prof. Dr. Christopher Baum, Chairman of the Board of Directors of BIH and Chief Translational Research Officer of Charité. Prof. Baum set the tone for the evening, highlighting his recognition for the project teams for having embarked upon developing novel products and solutions to have a positive impact at scale while also pursuing their clinical and research careers. Based on ten spin-offs by former BIH DHA projects to date, he invited fellow academic medical centers to explore collaborations on the successful model of the BIH DHA program.
In her keynote speech titled “Future of Healthcare: Towards a Partner Ecosystem” Carina Snijder, Vice President and Head of Research Program and Clinical Research Board at Philips, shared insights into key challenges and solutions for large corporation of working with startups. In her complementary impulse lecture “Institutional Mismatch and Lessons for Building Digital Health Businesses”, Prof. Ariel Dora Stern, Associate Professor at Harvard Business School and Alexander von Humboldt-Professor at Hasso Plattner Institute, shed light on the difficulty for digital health startups to navigate partially dated regulatory frameworks while also searching for product-market fit. Health tech entrepreneur and EIT Health expert Andrew Bourke moderated the evening.
Then the seven projects teams newly funded in the BIH DHA program since this year took center stage to pitch their innovations: Verifying the need for antibiotics at point-of-care; detecting epileptic seizures in children early; personalizing and streamlining the care path for patients with breast cancer; noninvasively maintaining or improving cognitive performance; optimizing bone fracture treatment; personalizing treatment for patients with bladder cancer; and enabling healthcare providers and industry to build and operate custom digital health solutions more efficiently.
The evening at Haus Ungarn near the City Hall of Berlin was rounded off by a networking session in which BIH DHA project teams engaged with colleagues from Charité and other medical centers, pharmaceutical and medical device industry representatives, investors, serial entrepreneurs and ecosystem partners, discussing cooperation opportunities to fully realize the translational potential of their innovations.