INNOVA4TB Challenge
Objectives
To stimulate the international and interdisciplinary collaboration in research and innovation
To develop research projects from innovative ideas for solving unmet medical problems
How did it work?
Researchers from different countries and different specialties from inside and outside of the consortium teamed up to give response to certain challenges proposed also buy the researchers during a brainstorming session.
Four teams with 3 to 6 participants were built.
INNOVA4LTBI - Sergio Díaz, Guillem Safont and Diego Gaete.
To find new diagnostic tools and biomarkers to predict progression to active tuberculosis from latent infection, and to identify in which phase of the spectrum of tuberculosis infection a patient is.
Spice Researchers - Daria Smalchuk, Andrii Dudnyk, Israel Molina, and Alicia Lacoma.
To solve the under development of not-sputum based confirmation of active TB diagnosis, particularly extrapulmonary tuberculosis.
INNOVA4CHILD - Mariia Finohenova and Daniel Capellán.
To find a reference test for diagnosing pediatric tuberculosis.
BIOMARKERS4TB - Zorica Nanovic, Zoran Stojanovic and Irene Latorre.
To find new biomarkers/scoring system(s) to address early failure of therapy in patients with pulmonary TB.
They were each assigned a faculty to mentor their process. After this and during different training sessions and follow-up meetings, more precise unmet medical needs were identified, proof of opportunity was stablished and a proposition of value was generated. Finally, the project proposal was built to solve the problem.
The projects were presented during the Annual Meeting held in Utrecht in June 2023 and evaluated by the Evaluation Committee: Rosamarie Preyer (GenID GmbH), Elmira Ibraim (Marius Nasta Institute of Pneumology) and Peter Bryant (IE Business School).
All teams were awarded with a mentoring programme to participate in one competitive activity.
For best proposal, BIOMARKERS4TB was awarded with 6000€ to proceed with their idea.
