This year’s cohort of the BIH Digital Health Accelerator (DHA) program started in early October with ten new teams. The aim of the program is to support translation projects in the concept design, product development, clinical validation and transfer of digital health innovations into medical applications, e.g. through licensing or company foundation.

The following projects are newly funded in DHA Phase 1 (“prototype”):

• PD Dr. Nikolaus Berndt and Dr. Johannes Eckstein, Charité: Kinetic organ metabolism models for diagnosis, therapy, and target identification
• Prof. Dr. Peter Hufnagl and Norman Zerbe, Charité: Platform-based collaboration ecosystem for digital pathology
• Dr. Jakob Kaminski, Charité: Patient-reported outcome app with computational assay in mental health
• Dr. Sophie Lehnerer, Charité: Telemedical myasthenia gravis solution for therapy optimization
• PD. Dr. Dr. Stefan Niehues and Dr. Keno Bressem, Charité: AI-based diagnostic solution for ICU and emergency care
• Dr. Michael Nordine, Charité: Non-invasive tracking of cerebral function to improve perioperative neurological outcomes
• PD Dr. Angela Relógio, Charité: A molecular-computational tool to monitor circadian effects and optimize cancer therapy
• PD Dr. Katharina Schmitt and Florian Groß, Charité: A patient engagement platform for long-term clinical follow-up for cardiology patients
• Prof. Dr. Dominik Seelow and Robin Steinhaus, BIH/Charité: Detection of disease-causing DNA sequence variants in monogenic diseases
• PD Dr. Simon Sündermann and Prof. Dr. Anja Hennemuth, Charité: Personalized therapy solution for heart valve disease.

The kick-off took place on September 23rd in the center of Berlin with a program presentation, followed by a fire-side chat with Dr. David Higgins, neuroscientist and expert in machine learning, Dr. Yoni Goldwasser, digital health expert and most recently Director of Venture Development at APX, and Bartosz Kosmecki, Managing Director Stryker and Co-Founder and CEO Scopis GmbH. Afterwards, teams from former DHA cohorts welcomed the new teams, including Prof. Frederick Klauschen, Charité and Co-Founder AIgnostics GmbH, and Dr. Alexander Meyer, Head of DHZB Medical Data Science and Project X-Cardiac. The evening was rounded off by a lively get-together.

Together with seven projects in DHA Phase 2 (“Product”) the DHA program currently supports 17 teams. In addition to funding, the program includes mentoring by experts, a co-working space at BIH, as well as networks of development partners, talents for team completion, and commercialization partners and investors. In the first half of 2020, the first two translation successes were recorded through spin-offs. The next two translation successes are currently prepared for market entry this year or in early 2021.

The BIH wishes the teams every success with their translation projects.