Italian startup InSilicoTrials submitted 9 Horizon 2020 projects and won 3, thus significantly exceeding the average success rate that is around 5%. A great achievement for a small but rapidly expanding company that found its own positioning in the healthtech sector thanks to a unique cloud-based platform that can reduce cost and time of drug and medical device development up to 50%.
Winning 3 H2020 projects is proof that InSilicoTrials is considered a strategic, economically sound and trustworthy company at an international level. InSilicoTrials will be working with over 140 esteemed European scientists until 2024.
Horizon 2020 is the biggest EU’s funding program for research and innovation, with nearly €80 billion of funding made available in the last 7 years (from 2014 to 2020). It promises more breakthroughs and discoveries by taking great ideas from the lab to the market, with an emphasis on excellent science, industrial leadership and societal challenges.
The 3 H2020 projects in which InSilicoTrials participates – SimCardioTest, Brainteaser, In Silico World – all leverage cutting-edge technology like Modeling and Simulation and Artificial Intelligence to accelerate innovation in healthcare, especially for drug and medical device development.
SimCardioTest, Brainteaser and In Silico World are collecting a total of €21.5 million in 4 years and involving a total of 28 partners, among which 12 renowned universities, from 13 different countries (Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, Norway, Serbia, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Hungary, USA). The projects are backed by regulatory bodies like the European Agency for Medicine (EMA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but also well-known multinational companies like Roche and Dassault Systèmes.
InSilicoTrials was assigned a total budget of €1.8 million.
The 3 projects are going to leverage simulations with different objectives. SimCardioTest will tackle cardiovascular diseases, first cause of death worldwide, through the design of predictive tools for drug and medical device development. Brainteaser’s aim is to improve the quality of life of patients affected by ALS and Multiple Sclerosis, while helping clinicians predict disease progression and assign treatment. In Silico World will develop 11 computational solutions to test the safety and the efficacy of medical devices and medicinal products to treat Osteoporosis, Tuberculosis, Multiple Sclerosis, Coronary Stenosis, Cerebral Aneurysms, Mammary Carcinoma, and COVID-19 infection.
In these 3 projects InSilicoTrials is playing a very unique role: the company leads the analysis of the business opportunities for the technological solutions developed, aiming to maximize the commercial exploitation of the new tools through the platform InSilicoTrials.com. This means that in the next 4 years a relevant number of impactful and validated computational models will populate the InSilicoTrials.com platform, contributing with other models to build a marketplace for pharmaceutical companies, contract research organizations (CROs) and medical device producers. On the platform very complex computational models are developed into easy-to-use and cost-effective products – available in a pay-per-use mode – to support and innovate the healthcare industry.
“Our aim is to accelerate innovation in healthcare”, says Luca Emili, CEO and Founder of InSilicoTrials. “This is why winning 3 Horizon 2020 projects, EU’s biggest funding programme for innovation and research, is a milestone for our company. This outstanding achievement was possible thanks to the hard work and commitment of our excellent team. We trust that these projects will contribute to speed up the uptake of Modeling and Simulation for drug and medical device development, while demonstrating its effectiveness and scientific reliability”.
About InSilicoTrials Technologies
InSilicoTrials is an emerging startup founded in 2018 by a team of life sciences, cybersecurity, and digital innovation experts, which aims to revolutionize the Healthcare sector thanks to an innovative digital simulation platform. Today, the very long and expensive development, as well as the subsequent registration/certification processes for new drugs and medical devices, are becoming unsustainable, especially for SMEs. Modeling and Simulation can reduce these costs up to 50% and greatly accelerate the go-to-market of new products, allowing companies to exploit patents for a longer period. Regulatory agencies are recommending companies to adopt these practices, but many of these lack the high expertise, expensive software, and IT infrastructure, needed to develop and use models. InSilicoTrials solves these problems by selecting and collecting the best models from top researchers around the world and then by integrating them with the solvers in a scalable IT platform, which makes it easier to use validated models without specific computational knowledge, paying only for the used resources.