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Making an impact – the driver to achieve

This year, Carmen van Vilsteren retired from her role as director of Eindhoven Medtech Innovation Center (e/MTIC). In this article she looks back on her six-year tenure.
 

Becoming director of Eindhoven MedTech Innovation Center

It more or less evolved. I was director of the Strategic Area Health at the Eindhoven University of Technology (ºÚÁϸ£ÀûÍø) at the time and a fixed-term project was already under way with the ºÚÁϸ£ÀûÍø, Philips, Máxima MC, Catharina Hospital, and Kempenhaeghe sleep and epilepsy center. But midway through, there was a consensus that structural collaboration was needed to turn this  incidental program into a structural innovation collaboration between the strategic partners, and a base for data exchange. That’s when I was invited to take the lead and e/MTIC was launched formally in 2018.

I had spent 20 years working for Philips and was already working at ºÚÁϸ£ÀûÍø for quite a while, so it seemed logical for me to take on this task. I have always believed in public-private partnerships in solving the real challenges of healthcare and making an impact – which is my driver. To build an ecosystem on innovation in MedTech you need players from academia, industry and the healthcare sector. Plus government funding.
 

Developing an ecosystem

We started with five strategic partners but now other partners are joining. In fact, it's the largest ecosystem in the Netherlands around MedTech. I’m proud to have been one of the main drivers of this ecosystem. I put a lot of energy into it and, at times, it was not always easy. There were plenty of obstacles to be overcome. I think the big achievement is that it's a  mature ecosystem now, with a reputation, not only locally but also nationally and even internationally, as a very successful ecosystem and example for other public-private partnerships.

Obstacles along the way

One of the main criteria for success is having top-down support from our boards and, as we know, boards and CEOs are constantly changing. So, it's very important to keep that support because with new directors come new strategies. We had to keep the e/MTIC supervisory board members active, positive and engaged about this strategic collaboration. Another challenge from the beginning was how to share data, especially in the health domain. It's already difficult within one institute but it’s even more difficult to share data over hospitals and science and the university and a private partnership like Philips. That had not been done before in our domain. We put a lot of effort into doing that in a way that not only benefits innovation but also complies with all the rules of the different parties, and national and international regulations on data sharing and privacy, etc.. And then also make it affordable.

Overcoming the issues

We built long-term roadmaps on our strategic topics (cardiovascular, perinatal and sleep) and established process teams because, after all, we already knew we were going to set up a long-term, multi-year collaboration from day one. We said we had to invest in how to share data and knowledge. We asked: How are we going to do the regulatory aspects and get structural funding? The process teams helped all our researchers on data-sharing data and IP filing, for instance. But the data sharing was a bit of a monster from the beginning with organizational issues and legal issues among others. Have all those issues been overcome at this point as I would like? Let’s say that significant progress has been made. As a frontrunner, it can be hard to get everyone on board in the way we think and work. I guess it took more time than I expected.

Evolving and expanding

MedTech is an undervalued area, but it can make a major contribution to the necessary healthcare transformation. Looking back, I think it has become really clear to the rest of the Netherlands that e/MTIC is an ecosystem whose scale extends nationwide and is also internationally recognized as a successful and exemplary public-private partnership. That’s a very important milestone!

Along with the valuable publications and IPs, new products, new professors and the cross assignments where people at the university and in the hospital or at Philips can work at each others’ organizations. I do recall a very specific moment concerning a large growth fund proposal project in the Netherlands about data sharing. Participating as the only non-academic hospital as a public-private partnership, we were even selected to become the data hub in a national data sharing platform. I think it's an achievement that we are really ahead on that on that topic compared to the rest of the Netherlands. All our PhDs working on e/MTIC projects have three supervisors, industrial, clinical and academic. With this, we are educating a new kind of innovator in the MedTech domain and keeping them in our own ecosystem. They also exchange knowledge and  socialize in a community of researchers, which did not exist at the beginning. So you really see the e/MTIC ecosystem continuously evolving and expanding.

The future in good hands

It’s the dawn of the next generation; younger people are starting to replace the gray heads. It’s a refreshing trend. As people who work within the ecosystem take that knowledge with them to their next position and expand the collaboration under the umbrella of e/MTIC, I'm pretty convinced that we will have more partners and more application domains, and the impact of the ecosystem will snowball. As for me, I'm the chair of the top sector life science and health, so you can be sure that in this role I'll take with me the learnings from e/MTIC and put them into practice in other public-private partnerships in the Netherlands.