StratNeuro Innovation
StratNeuro has assigned a dedicated Innovation Officer to more deliberately identify ways to drive new innovations in the field of neuroscience. Any scientist, student or employee at KI working in the field of Neuroscience, with a business idea coming out of research can make use of the programme.
The Innovation Officer can help you with
- identifying projects that have a potential for commercialisation or social innovation
- evaluating the potential to develop new scientific or medical methods or procedures from your research
- partnering on your product or service invention with investors, industry and public organizations
Is my project eligible?
There are some requirements for your project or idea to be eligible for partnerships with industry partners or public organisations.
For industry partnering
- There must be a real need for the invention or service.
Is there really a problem that needs your solution?
- Market potential
There must be customers willing to pay for the future product or service idea, if it works and is better than competing solutions. Thus, there must be someone who cares and is willing to pay for it in the market. Is it competitive versus other solutions already on the market or under development? The industry partner is more likely to invest if there is a potential for profit with the new product idea.
- If there is intellectual property critical for the business idea, e.g. an invention, it needs to be protected by a patent.
Already public disclosures about the invention, in an article, poster or oral presentation at a symposium or conference can destroy the possibilities for IP protection. Thus, patent first, then publish if you plan to protect your invention and want to get an industry partner to invest in your idea.
- It needs to have reached a certain degree of maturity.
Most projects in our programme (>95%) are too early and immature to raise interest from the industry when they enter our programme. The objective with our programmes Start and Drive is to build more commercial value in the projects to make them more attractive and successful in raising funding from investors or other funding agencies for business development.
For public organisations
- The same criteria as for industry partnering apply. Public organisations' aim though is to save tax money and/or improve health care and citizens' quality of life rather than profit.
- Needs to have potential for real impact on health care or our society (eg. cost savings, better health) and to have a clear advantage versus competing solutions (current or under development).
KI Innovations
Mats Ferm, Ph.D. (Dr. Med. Sci.)
Innovation officer, KI InnovationsExamples of industrial partnerships
Neuroscientists within StratNeuro collaborate with a range of industrial partners, from big pharma, biotech and health technology companies. These collaborations range from drug discovery, target validation, discovery and validation of novel diagnostics and development of novel instrumentation.
- Neuroscientist Jan Mulder leads a group of scientists to identify protein expression changes in neurological disease exploiting this technology. This effort exploits the industry-leading development of selective antibodies by the local company, Atlas Antibodies, AB. Eventually, novel findings hope to lead to the discovery and development of novel PET ligands in collaboration with GE Healthcare and the KI PET centre.
- Jan Ygge’s group has identified a screening paradigm for the early identification of children at risk for dyslexia using eye-tracking techonology from Tobii AB (a Stockholm-based instrument company). This effort has led to the development of a spin-off company, Lexplore, which now has over 15 full-time employees. This team also collaborates with Microsoft in the development of their cloud-based artificial intelligence analysis.
- AstraZeneca is funding several PET projects with the KI PET Centre. One is headed by Andrea Varrone, AstraZenca is supporting the development of a novel PET ligand to bind to alpha-synuclein deposits in Parkinson patients. Alzecure Discovery AB is collaborating on the chemistry aspects of the project.