Health: A Public Interest And Technological Challenge

Paulette Lenert, Luxembourg’s Minister of Health (Photo © SIP / Yves Kortum)

Luxembourg is focusing heavily on the intersection of health and technology. Paulette Lenert, Minister of Health, and Franz Fayot, Minister of Economy, discuss health strategy and their visions for the future of this sector in Luxembourg.

High quality health services are a public good. How is Luxembourg positioning itself to ensure the continued development of this sector?

Paulette Lenert: Luxembourg has always aimed to make available the best therapy for the patient at the right time. Therefore, various governments were never shy of investing heavily in healthcare infrastructure and workforce, thus making us one of the most expensive and efficient systems.

The setup of a national Biobank and the development of several concepts and teams in clinical research helped to lay the groundwork for the precision and personalised medicine of the future. The LCTR (Fuerschungsklinik Letzebuerg) [a training clinic], the national cancer institute (Institut National de Cancer), or the development of the disease specific networks (réseaux de compétences) are only a few examples of initiatives that will continuously improve quality and access to care for the Luxembourg population.

The continuous support from the Ministry and Directorate of Health to strengthen the development of medical research at the hospital level via dedicated grants and human resources is as another step into a new future integrating research and care for the benefit of the patient.

Franz Fayot: I very much agree that equal access to a high quality healthcare system is an essential value of our society. Innovation has been changing what “good” looks like. This requires us to keep updating what are the newest, most innovative medical products and services. And, what better way to meet this ambition, than to share in the development of these medical technologies of the future? 

This is exactly what the ministries of economy, research and health set out to do in 2008, when the government pursued a strategy of diversifying our economy by fostering innovation in health technologies. Initially, through laying the foundations in world-leading public biomedical research, such as the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB). As this success story has come to fruition, we are partnering with the FNR [national research fund] on initiatives to accelerate technology transfers from research towards spin-offs or licensing deals, and to integrate this into a broader economic development for health technologies in Luxembourg.

Which verticals does Luxembourg want to develop in particular?


Paulette Lenert: Luxembourg, as a small country with only a short history in medical research and a limited medical research and development environment, needs to focus on its strengths and cannot simply follow what others have done.

Excellent infrastructure and IT environments like Tier 4 data centers and high-speed connectivity initially developed and built for the financial sector can be used as the backbone of the medicine of the future.

Therefore, Luxembourg will focus mainly on the domains of digital health, diagnostics and medical devices where such an infrastructure is key for success.

An integrated approach for health data storage, analysis and use for the benefit of the patient is very much possible in a country like Luxembourg with a single payer healthcare system and only four acute and seven specialised hospitals.

Franz Fayot: We would like to double-down on our strengths in sectors we are already active in and create further links between them to capture new opportunities. To be practical, the Luxembourg healthtech sector had already created industrial champions in their own niches, such as the medical fridges for vaccines from B Medical Systems, or the medical valves from Rotarex for medical gases. These are medical devices.

Our second pillar concerns the diagnostics sector, illustrated by the PCR tests from Fast Track Diagnostics, these are in-vitro medical devices. The third element is products based on digital technologies that will connect, process and augment the medical data streams between patients and their healthcare providers, which we refer to as digital health. We observe here already a strong set of startups emerging, such as ViewMind, Arspectra and many others.

“We would like to create a platform for innovation and care, using technology and digital health as a tool to transform our healthcare system and the way we deliver care with a focus on patient outcome.

Paulette Lenert, Luxembourg’s Minister of Health


Paulette Lenert:
Digital health has been the keyword in health in recent years. Due to the excellent infrastructure, like for example the high performance computer “Meluxina”, Luxembourg has already been leading in some areas. I would like to give only a few selected examples, showing the diversity of projects and competences present in Luxembourg’s healthcare sector.

The Living Lab for Digital Transition in Healthcare towards 5G (LiLa 5G), a project led by the Centre Hospitalier Emile Mayrisch (CHEM) on specific use cases tries to test:

  • reliable and fast access to medical data for caregivers through an efficient and integrated network, and
  • improved communication between caregivers and patients.

The IoT healthcare platform set up by the Hôpitaux Robert Schuman (HRS), allows medical data to be exchanged securely, reliably and in real time between all actors involved in a patient’s health journey. This solution allows IoT-based monitoring and telemedicine at home to improve follow-up care for patients suffering from heart failure and an improved emergency onboarding process based on the stroke use case. The platform helps to improve the patient’s health journey and significantly facilitates the medical staff’s daily activities.

The Clinnova project, led by the LIH, is an international project between Germany, France and Luxembourg, aiming to build on the previous investments into fundamental biomedical research and form a bridge to the hospitals to ensure lab innovations and clinical implementation for the benefit of the patient.

Finally, yet importantly, the small task of transforming the Luxembourg healthcare system by using digital tools is certainly one of the most ambitious projects led by the Ministry and Directorate of Health. Aiming to make available highly qualitative data for the patients, the caregiver and the authorities, this project will lay the groundwork to allow the use of other digital tools like AI or machine learning in the future. This national approach evolves around 3 pillars: 1. the health data governance of the data, 2. the technical systems to put in place and 3. the initial and continuous funding of innovations in the healthcare system.

Franz Fayot: The implications of a data economy are indeed fascinating for health. With the goal of making it as straightforward as possible for individual projects to succeed, we see our role in creating shared platforms to simplify non-core activities. Around the Meluxina supercomputer, we are one of several government departments to create services to standardise, pseudononymise, and protect data when reusing it for innovation. We want to see what our innovators, be it companies or public research, can achieve when the rest is plug and play. While we are still in the startup phase, the first projects are already quite ambitious. So for the health sector, this platform will show what it can contribute to analysing medical data for treatment decisions in autoimmune patient cohorts.

How does Luxembourg support emerging healthtech companies?

Paulette Lenert: Various public actors from the Ministry of Research to the Ministry of Economy ensure the support of emerging healthtech companies.

The Ministry of Health engages in creating platforms for healthtech companies in order to integrate their products into the healthcare system. Be it via the support of a pilot project, or more long term discussions and engagements that require policy work.

As an example, Luxembourg is currently setting up a national drug agency that among the more typical tasks and missions also encompasses the support for innovation in the fields of digital health, medical devices and diagnostics, allowing for rapid evaluation and accelerated access to the Luxembourg and, ultimately, European market.

Franz Fayot: Our national innovation agency, Luxinnovation, supports the innovation needs of our key industrial sectors. The HealthTech Cluster team is the first port of call for general sector guidance and networking. They are complemented by the Startup Team for support in the pre-revenue stage. Particularly exciting is the acceleration programme Fit4Start, where the five most promising HealthTech startups receive dedicated coaching over six months and a €150k grant to implement their operational plan.

A new programme will be launched in early 2023 to accelerate regulatory roadmaps and go to market strategies in the sector. This will address the needs also of more mature companies that are adapting to new regulations.

“We would like to double-down on our strengths in sectors we are already active in and create further links between them to capture new opportunities.

Franz Fayot, Luxembourg’s Minister of Economy

How does your ministry support innovation in healthtech in particular? Are there any ongoing projects that you would like to share with us?


Paulette Lenert: Various projects in the digital health field are on their way in Luxembourg and in other countries. As always in the healthcare sector, it is not only about bringing a product to the market, but it is equally if not more important to ensure the use and the reimbursement of this product. Therefore, Luxembourg is currently setting up a new kind of medicines agency with a strong focus on digital health and medical devices, allowing products to be evaluated and enabling a fast go to market and reimbursement strategy.

With grants for medical research projects in hospitals and ensuring research dedicated resources at the hospital level, the Ministry of Health tries to move slowly from purely caregiving hospitals to research driven hospitals developing new and better diagnostics and care, again benefiting the patient and the healthcare system.

In an ever-developing world, setting the digital healthcare framework is key. This depends not only on the technical developments, but also more on the cultural aspects and ethics of a society. While Luxembourg strives to become a testbed for clinical and digital health research, for example for artificial intelligence, we need to make sure that the legislative work is rock solid to secure our patients’ data. The most important part of this is gaining and keeping the patients’ trust.

Franz Fayot: We support innovation needs across all the growth stages of companies. The traditional tools of state aid, RDI grants, are of course interesting to de-risk the product development stage. In HealthTech specifically, we need our companies to work with public research and medical professionals to test and validate their new products and services. Without this clinical validation, the products, thankfully, cannot be sold. For Luxembourg to compete, we need to check our work, collaborate and improve products in the early development stages. To build this collaboration culture, we developed with the FNR and Luxinnovation a Joint Call for public-private-partnerships to match healthtech projects at prototype stage with hospitals that wish to co-develop and validate these products at a clinical level for the benefit of their patients and produce nationally or even internationally leading innovation.

What’s your vision for Luxembourg’s healthtech sector?

Paulette Lenert: There is a clear need to innovate and prepare for the healthcare of the future as technologies advance and it becomes more and more difficult to financially sustain the current system.

Therefore, we would like to create a platform for innovation and care, using technology and digital health as a tool to transform our healthcare system and the way we deliver care with a focus on patient outcome. The healthcare of the future will focus more on predictive and preventive medicine in order to avoid diseases and death. Such a system and a paradigm change also needs an adapted healthcare financing from per patient payments to value based care.

This will not change overnight, hence we will launch our vision and roadmap with making information accessible to the patient, the care giver and the authorities to ensure better care and a first step to precision medicine. Data governance and health data policy play a very important role in this vision and present an opportunity for Luxembourg to move faster and to become the first real data-driven healthcare system in the world. This in return will thus also drive the economy and favour the development of a new economic pillar in digital health.

Ultimately, this will lead to a correlation of all kinds of data sources from a patient, creating a virtual or digital twin, allowing “virtual diagnostics” (e.g. genetic background analysis, social behaviour, or prior health issues).

Predicting a disease and by consequence preventing this disease is beneficial to the patient, who will not suffer. But, it is also beneficial to the system as it frees up space to take care of other patients. This will help to make more resources available, be they human or financial, leading us into a new era of health and care.

Franz Fayot: As a lighthouse project for the Luxembourg HealthTech sector, I have great hopes for the HE:AL Campus project which, over 2.3 ha in Esch, will build the infrastructure required to house innovative HealthTech companies, next to public research, as well as the future CHEM Südspidol. With accelerated innovation cycles, we will then be able to attract promising healthtech companies that are ready to scale internationally and thus flesh out further what we have been building locally.

Other important elements that will help us in the future are the Medicines products agency that will support companies with guidance on regulatory needs. I am also hopeful that the ongoing discussions in creating a reimbursement framework for digital health with an appropriate scientific evaluation beforehand will yield its fruits before long. The area of digital therapeutics and digital diagnostics is upon us and I wish our companies to have the best opportunities to play their part.

How can innovation benefit the daily life of individuals?

Paulette Lenert: Creating a platform or platforms that allow innovation in a running system enables accelerated and fast integration of new therapies, diagnostics and monitoring into the system with a direct benefit of the patient and the system. This is especially true for all the digital health solutions that are now reaching the market.

Franz Fayot: Innovation is a key element in driving our businesses forward. Similarly, our research institutes are constantly innovating. It is thanks to these innovations that we make scientific progress, which helps to improve everyone’s life. Innovation is also an essential lever for moving towards a sustainable future. In the future, as artificial intelligence advances and more of clinical research will shift to real world data analysis, what our public research and company innovators will need is access to anonymised health data to look for research hypotheses, to check how a certain treatment choice helps a patient or which treatment really is the best. Our ambition is to conduct this work from Luxembourg, so that it meets our European values and takes into account our needs, our populations and medicine of the future.


This article was first published in the Silicon Luxembourg magazine. Get your copy.

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