Jean-Paul Scheuren, the CEO of the House of BioHealth talks about Luxembourg’s ambition to become an important player in personalised medicine in Europe and worldwide.
Inaugurated in February 2015 and based in Esch-sur-Alzette, the House of BioHealth aims to meet the needs of new and existing companies in the fields of biotechnology, ICT, and environmental technologies. Jean-Paul Scheuren, CEO, looks back on the seven years of operation and on the incubator’s achievements.
Jean-Paul Scheuren, what is the idea behind the House of BioHealth?
It is to develop and promote the interdisciplinarity of biotechnologies, ICT, and clean technologies, as well as the presence of companies from these three sectors on a common site. The implicit objective is to allow significant synergies between these fields, in order to generate opportunities, at the intersection of biomedical research and big data, for example. The approach is based on a targeted mix between public research activities and commercial activities, as well as between start-ups and established companies.”
The incubator offers them a real opportunity to develop their activity in a dynamic, scientific, economic, and cultural environment. This is a unique hosting facility with 20,000sqm and 18 entities. These can also benefit from entrepreneurial support and professional coaching in the field of business development focusing on sector-specific activities.
What will be the next steps?
The implementation of the HE:AL campus. It is a unique economic and Healthtech concept, particularly in the field of diagnostics and preventive treatment, on 55,000sqm of new space. It is also a living laboratory for companies specialised in personalised medicine, as well as an accelerator for start-ups with a focus on Digital Health Technologies. It will serve as a facilitator of innovative business models for private and public health funding as well as a platform hosting mature companies active in digital health, AI, mHealth, Deep learning and predictive analytics.
Concretely speaking, the idea is to develop a campus around the medicine of tomorrow, which will be Preventive, Predictive, Personalised, and Participatory. By implementing this concept, we are thus creating a welcoming ground for companies that want to develop a health economic model based on these 4 Ps, and to develop new therapies based on patient data.
Furthermore, our goal is to develop the sector and to prepare the ground, so that health actors use Luxembourg as a laboratory to analyse new therapies on the patient while integrating it into the social security system. Our vision is to make it a hub to access the European market. We are here entering another dimension, with the ambition to make Luxembourg an important player in personalised medicine in Europe even worldwide.
What are the growth prospects for Healthtech in Luxembourg?
The sector is becoming data driven. The diagnosis plays an increasingly important role in the medicine of the future. And if you want to personalize it, you need an almost permanent follow-up of the patient.
Thus, we strongly believe that the HE:AL Campus will be a fantastic tool for attracting the highest quality medical doctors who want to link their activity to the Research and Development of new therapies and remain at the edge of medical treatment.
This article was first published in the Silicon Luxembourg magazine. Get your copy.
