Medicen Paris Region reorganizes its Strategic Areas of Activities (DAS) to bring engineers and doctors closer together

Paris, France, October 10, 2019 – Medicen Paris Region, Europe’s leading health competitiveness cluster, today announces a reorganization of its Strategic Activities Areas (Domaines d’Activité Stratégiques – DAS), and its governance, in order to be ready for the challenges in healthcare innovation and in competing at an international level.

“With the growing use of precision medicine, AI and combined therapeutic solutions; in the future healthcare will be interdisciplinary. Our new organization will focus on the vital collaboration between clinicians and engineers and between academics and industry. We are firmly committed to bringing doctors and engineers closer together so they can create next-generation therapeutic solutions,” said Stéphane Roques, CEO of Medicen Paris Region.

Medicen is now structured into five strategic areas: biological diagnostics, imaging, biotherapies and molecules, digital health and techno-therapies. The new techno-therapies area will help develop those technological innovations applied to patient care.

“Creating this new area at the crossroads of multiple sectors will help highlight technological vectors with therapeutic purposes that are integrated within patient care, such as implants, 3D printing, exoskeletons, robotics or nanoparticles. They have the power to transform medical practice by offering more efficiency, more control and more predictability, while saving time and money,” said Agathe Arlotti, head of the health innovation team at Medicen. “In addition to imaging and biological diagnostics, Medicen will support the French medical technology market, which represents €19bn ($20.8bn), with a yearly growth of 5%. (FR)”

Medicen’s strategic orientation committee includes key opinion leaders in the health sector who provide advice on the cluster’s governance. They recently highlighted the need to bring research areas closer together. This is even more necessary when the Greater Paris region offers indisputable assets in terms of engineering, mathematics and biology.

The new governance of the Strategic Activities Areas:

Biological diagnostics

• President: Jérôme Sallette, chief innovation officer, Cerba Healthcare
• Vice-president: Prof. Patrice Debré, Cell and Tissue Immunology Laboratory, Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière, (AP-HP)

Biotherapies and molecules

• President: Hugues Dolgos, deputy director, Biopharmacy Center of Excellence, Servier
• Vice-presidents:
  • Jérôme Larghero, director, Biotherapies Department and APHP Meary Center of Cell and Gene Therapy, Hôpital Saint-Louis (AP-HP)
  • Dr Jean-Louis Pinquier, consultant in clinical development and translational medicine, former deputy global head of the Clinical and Exploratory Pharmacology Department at Sanofi R&D

Imaging

• President: François Kotian, chief engineer, GE Healthcare
• Vice-presidents:
  • Guy Frija, radiologist, Université Paris Descartes/ ESR
  • Alain Luciani, medical imaging, GHU Henri Mondor, Université Paris Est Créteil, APHP
  • Valérie Vilgrain, head of Medical Imaging Department, Hôpital Beaujon, AP-HP

Techno-therapies

• President: Antoine Groheux, innovation manager, Medtronic France
• Vice-presidents:
  • Prof Eric Vicaut, manager, Clinical Research Unit, Saint-Louis Lariboisière Fernand-Widal
  • Dr Jean-Marc Collombet, head of the Osteo-Articular-Biotherapy Unit, Institut de Recherche Biomédicale des Armées (IRBA)

Digital health 

• President: Carlos Jaime, country general manager, InterSystems France
• Vice-president: Philippe Gesnouin, technology transfer associate for life sciences and medical applications, Direction for Transfer and Innovation, Inria

In addition to their role in launching projects and discussing key emerging areas within each DAS, the key opinion leaders will meet several times a year to select topics relevant to innovation. The next meeting will focus on new ways of reinventing the operating room and on the challenges in implementing point-of-care.

More information on the DAS (FR)

About Medicen Paris Region

Medicen Paris Region is a competitiveness cluster for innovative health technologies, with a national and international scope. It federates over 440 members including startups companies, research centers, universities, hospitals and local authorities. It focuses on five strategic areas and on combined therapeutic solutions that will mix several of these areas with precision medicine: biological diagnostics and analysis, medical imaging, biotherapies, digital health and the development of techno-therapies. In close collaboration with regional and national healthcare innovation players, Medicen Paris Region aims to:

• Foster the emergence, development and funding of collaborative and individual projects in the healthcare sector
• Accelerate growth and international development of innovative startups and SMEs
• Strengthen the attractiveness of the Greater Paris region, of which the ecosystem represents more than 50% of life sciences activity in France

Between 2005 and 2018, Medicen Paris Region has supported the launch of 80 innovative products and helped 335 projects to obtain regional, national and European public funding. Thanks to Medicen, Paris Region healthcare actors have attracted a total investment close to €1.9bn ($2.1bn) including €708M ($777M) of public aid.

www.medicen.org