Posts tagged: Medical Technology

The pandemic is increasingly becoming a race: a neck-and-neck race between research, development and production of drugs and vaccines on the one hand and mutations on the other. Microfluidics can make all the difference in this race, because microfluidic components accelerate the speed of development and Lab-on-a-chip and chemical microreactors make mobile rapid tests possible and accelerate vaccine development.

Around 1.7 million people in Germany currently suffer from dementia. To provide them and their relatives with sustainable support and relieve caregivers in the long term, we are working with high-tech companies in the ZIM-network ‘KMU4DEMENTIA’ on innovative products such as technical assistance systems and software-based concepts. One example is the correct interpretation of patients' state of mind with the help of artificial intelligence.

In the medical market, the photonics industry is seeing new product launches that have specific requirements for health applications. Europe is a source of both application markets and innovative technologies. The session on laser and photonic applications, organized and carried out in cooperation with EPIC, shows examples from developers of photonic medical devices and their supply chains.

The miniaturization of the dimensions, the precision of the components with their increasing variety of shapes and greater functional integration are the keys to future developments. They are also influenced to a large extent by new technologies that originate from materials engineering and physical process engineering.

Individual patient care is becoming increasingly important. On the one hand, this saves valuable resources, for example in terms of medication and diagnostic tools, and on the other hand helps to provide targeted medical treatment for patients' ailments.

When WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus admonished nations to “test, test, test”, back in March of this year, testing was already recognized as a key strategy in the fight against COVID-19. In response to this, the diagnostics industry has been racing to develop new high-speed test platforms that can quickly and accurately carry out the wide-scale testing needed.

The corona pandemic with the new virus COVID-19 is turning our lives upside down and we are all confronted with a new and completely unexpected situation. At the moment we are increasingly asked by our customers: can you help with corona diagnostics with your micropump? That would be possible. Modern biotechnology needs microstructure technology.

What drives innovation in micro- and nanotechnology in 2020? And what economic, political, societal or organizational challenges are high-tech companies facing? The IVAM Survey 2020 focused on these questions. As in previous years, the survey was conducted among several thousand European companies and institutes in the fields of microtechnology, MEMS, nanotechnology, advanced materials and related key enabling technologies.

We would like to introduce our board members to you: For this reason, we did short interviews with them about key technologies, technology trends and the relevance of networks. Matthias Lorenz from AEMtec GmbH in Berlin has been a member of the IVAM board since March 2014. His areas of specialization include microsystems technology and the medical technology market in Europe and North America.