European life science SMEs offer innovative and globally competitive technologies, products and services. For most of them, it is a big challenge to set up their business on their own in unknown, often time-consuming and complex markets outside Europe, and to identify the right business partners and contacts.
Funded by EIT Health within the framework of its Accelerator programme “GoGlobal”, BioM developed the training project “Start.Smart.Japan” specially for start-ups, scale-ups and SMEs, whose goal it is to enter the Japanese life-science market.
Japan has the world’s third largest healthcare market and ranks amongst Europe’s top 5 pharmaceutical trading partners. Given Europe’s leading position in life sciences and Japan’s interest in novel technologies, services and products, this sector holds significant opportunities for innovative European SMEs. However, for European health service and product companies to introduce complex and new cutting-edge technologies and to established large companies and the conservative Japanese health market can be time consuming, tedious and consultation-intensive. Start.Smart.Japan will help to speed up this process.
The target participants in the GoGlobal programmes are start-ups, scale-ups and SMEs – companies who already offer a product, started to sell, or who are in the last stage of their Certification process. They have the ambition to expand on the Japanese market within a year. The companies also fit to EIT Health thematic scope: “Healthy living, Active Ageing, Improved Health care.”
The following companies were selected:
Bicoll is an expert in drug discovery and development solutions through access to plant natural compound libraries. Bicoll Plant Profiles™ give you access to the most promising source for new patentable, high quality leads in 9 months at a reasonable cost. They can be applied both as pharmaceutical lead structures as well as in the field of nutraceutical / food additive. Bicoll medicinal chemistry department offers custom synthesis from 1 mg to 1 kg in between 6 weeks and 3 months.
BioSerenity is a medical device company focused on developing smart healthcare solutions leveraging Smart Clothing, Apps, A.I. and a telemedicine Cloud platform. BioSerenity has quickly become a technological leader in mobile diagnostics and monitoring with thousands of patients diagnosed through its solutions and several pharmaceutical deals.
A Star-Trek like medical device that provides the solution to killing multiresistant bacteria and treating chronic wounds.
Cytes Biotechnologies provides the scientific community with the highest quality cells and most innovative related technology using well standardized and validated processes to ensure uniform quality, high cell viability, safety and traceability in compliance with ethical and regulatory standards around the world.
Currently, hepatic cell culture products are provided, obtained from healthy liver tissues for the development of drug test, tissue engineering, cell therapy, basic research, and others. Any other organ or tissue could be available if needed, e.g. within the framework of a detailed project in flagship initiatives such as human rare diseases, diabetes, heart disease, etc.
doDOC is a collaborative platform for complex documents. Teams can plan, draft, edit, review and approve documents with well-governed workflows and granular permissions, providing audit-trail reporting capabilities. In addition, doDOC can automatically recognize GDPR-sensitive contents in your documents and alert you to take action. Top10 pharmaceutical companies, some of the largest legal firms and major engineering service providers are already using the doDOC for their documents, including the most complex ones.
siTools Biotech is a young German Biotech specializing on molecular tools to study gene function in biomedical research. Building on the concept of complex but defined siRNA pools we develop novel RNAi reagents that silence target genes with reliable efficiency and overcome off-target effects. siPOOLsTM containing 30 carefully selected siRNAs are available for any annotated gene or custom target sequence. Human siPOOLTM libraries are a new tool for arrayed RNAi screening with unmatched specificity.
A direct to consumer teledentistry platform that connects dentists with patients globally enabling at home cosmetic teeth straightening at a cost saving of up to 70%.
Forget everything you’ve been told about teeth straightening! This start-up is revolutionizing the cosmetic orthodontic market by making invisible aligners available without the need for monthly appointments or the traditional hefty cost attached to it. Using 3D printing, they have delivered aligners straight to the door of users in over 35 countries since their 2017 launch.
By building the very first AI orthodontist and instant smile simulator, their vision is to provide a solution to millions of adults worldwide looking to improve their smiles and self-confidence with an option that fits into their lifestyles.
SWORD Health offers the first AI-powered digital therapist ever with which is building the standard of care for the rehabilitation industry for the next 50 years. SWORD Phoenix is an integrated, simple and straightforward system that combines motion sensors with an innovative software approach for both the mobile application (patient-oriented) and the online console (professional-oriented) so that physical rehabilitation processes can be optimized. Considered by the European Commission as one of the most innovative companies in Europe, we have already developed partnerships in Portugal, Norway, Australia, Canada and US.
ZeClinics is a Biotech company offering zebrafish services for drug discovery, pre-clinical safety and efficacy screenings of novel compounds. We have key clients within the Pharma and Biotech sectors, although we are active in other sectors: Cosmetics and Agroindustry. Our track records and more than 25.000 scientific publications guarantee that using zebrafish in preclinical early phases could save up to 10X time and budget in R&D with a 95% predictivity on the effect of new drugs in humans.
Start.Smart.Japan is an exclusive, high quality training course that provides a starter kit for executives of European life sciences SMEs, helping them to optimize and accelerate their market entry in Japan. The training is sector-specific and targets the challenging Japanese business environment: regulatory and reimbursement environments for health products/services, access to agents and distributors with access to the appropriate customer networks, access to funding and financing opportunities, language and cultural complexities, different business conventions, understanding of market needs and competition.
In the first half of 2018, individual business interests and market entry needs will be identified. The process will be guided and supported by culture trainers and market experts, and you can benefit from various e-learning tools. Supported by BioM and Biocat, two globally experienced European life science clusters and their extensive networks in Japan, participants will work on specific tasks to prepare their individual market entries.
In the second half of 2018, an intensive on-site training will be carried out on 3-6 September in Martinsried/Munich. Focus is a 2-day culture workshop, followed by two days of peer-learning with companies already successfully operating in Japan in the relevant sectors. Achieved skills will be put into practice during a well-prepared, first market entry kick-off visit to Japan (Kansai-region, Yokohama/Tokyo/Kawasaki) mid-October. This is followed by post-visit evaluations to optimize your market entry strategy.
Each participating SME will receive a maximum of 2,100 EUR towards travel costs to participate in the Munich on-site training and the Japan roadshow. All e-learning, training and coaching units are provided free of charge.
EIT Health is an independent Community, constituted in 2008 by the European Institute for Innovation & Technology (EIT), which aims to boost innovation and speed up entrepreneurship in Europe.
EIT Health´s Accelerator is a business-development programme, and with its GoGlobal projects, participating companies can obtain better knowledge on the local ecosystem, special characteristics of the market, contacts and networking-opportunities and tailor-made training, which ease and accelerate the market entry into the target country. Different GoGlobal projects target different non-European markets: Brazil, China, Canada, Israel, Japan, USA.
Stephanie Wehnelt, Project Leader EIT Health GoGlobal Start.Smart.Japan, wehnelt@bio-m.org
