Goal
Development of innovative science-based technologies and services to provide better care and improve health for all.
Challenges
TEC4Health structures and promotes the growth of INESC TEC's intervention in the health sector, via research, development, and innovation of disruptive health technologies. The synergy between academia, industry and health institutions is a key aspect of our activity, while promoting the transfer of knowledge generated to address relevant societal challenges. TEC4Health is aligned with these partners to contribute to solutions for four major health challenges:
1 - Active and healthy ageing, to improve both so that the increase of life expectancy is followed by a high quality of life;
2 - Personalised medicine and biomarkers. We live in an era in which each person requires specific therapies, according to their genotypic and life characteristics. Novel automatic methods will help to identify patterns in the data that allow differentiated and timely diagnoses;
3 - The area of pharmacology, medicines and advanced therapies, mainly due to the new knowledge brought by genetics, bioinformatics and systems medicine;
4 - Digital health and medical technologies. They already play a solid role in hospital support systems (departmental systems, clinical records, and integration of auxiliary diagnostic methods), and have more recently gained importance in new areas like disease prevention and the increase of patient literacy, thus envisioning a future with a relevant degree of self-management of health.
Opportunities
Health is a sector with a growing number of technological opportunities. The value of life and how much it must be preserved is undeniable, but improvements on how we manage health also reflect strongly on other societal axis, such as the economy and industry. The recent COVID-19 pandemic is a clear example of the changes needed, namely on how we manage both disease and well-being; in this case, it became necessary to rethink everything regarding the treatment of infectious and chronic diseases, with monitoring as a crucial process. This is even clearer if we consider the set of current funding opportunities, e.g., the national recovery and resilience plan (PRR), the new European framework programme (focusing on several health topics), and the Mission Cancer. All these show the good amount of financial support provided to this sector. From a scientific perspective, nearly one third of world-wide publications are health related. Also, there has been a significant number of start-ups established in the health technologies area. These indicators show that there are many research, development and innovation activities in health technologies, as well as several opportunities.
TEC4Health seeks to promote the synergy between INESC TEC and its partners, with the first contributing with its competencies to activities that could lead to successful projects, contracts, and technology transfers, thus addressing the identified challenges and trending opportunities.
Value Proposition
TEC4HEALTH induces a market pull drive into R&D, targeting all the value chain actors and processes in the healthcare and well-being sectors. To accomplish this, TEC4HEALTH aims to explore the activities within the health sector where technology needs and roadmaps indicate a high potential for applying INESC TEC’s competencies.
