In this interview, Jean-Philippe Arié, manager of Luxinnovation’s Healthtech Cluster, delves into Luxembourg’s push towards personalized medicine, AI innovation, and a robust healthcare ecosystem, while highlighting the important role of Healthcare Week Luxembourg in driving innovation and collaboration.
The second edition of Healthcare Week Luxembourg (HWL) explores four major themes: personalized medicine, AI innovation, health governance, and health education and research in the Greater Region. Among these, which theme does Luxinnovation focus on the most?
Luxinnovation’s focus is primarily on personalized medicine and AI, but the most important thing is that you need to have all these themes working together. While personalized medicine and AI innovation are at the forefront, the key to progress lies in collaboration across all four themes. Luxinnovation sees itself as a facilitator in bringing together various stakeholders, such as researchers, healthcare providers, technology experts, and policymakers, to foster an environment where these elements can effectively interact.
By enabling these elements to work in unison, Luxinnovation believes that they can drive significant advancements in personalized medicine and AI while addressing broader issues in healthcare governance and education. Ultimately, their goal is to ensure that innovation reaches patients in a meaningful way, improving both healthcare outcomes and system efficiency.
“Startups need more than just funding; they need to understand the healthcare system deeply.”
Jean-Philippe Arié, manager of Luxinnovation’s Healthtech Cluster
Luxembourg aims to advance its healthcare ecosystem towards personalized medicine. What are the next steps on the roadmap to achieve this goal?
Luxembourg has begun several initiatives to collect and standardize data, a key aspect of advancing personalized medicine. The country is part of the European Health Data Space, which allows the collection and use of patient data for research, including projects like Clinnova and Dataspace4Health. Despite this, the journey toward fully personalized medicine is still in its early stages. The focus is on collecting and organizing data to train algorithms for more personalized treatments. In the next six to ten years, Luxembourg aims to further develop data-sharing platforms like Luxembourg National Data Exchange Services (LNDS), enabling the integration of more personalized healthcare approaches.
Furthermore, what we have pushed in recent years is the PPP joint-call projects with the MECO and the FNR. Here we’ve put public research hospitals in touch with healthcare companies so they can innovate together.
What benefits can artificial intelligence bring to Luxembourg’s healthcare system in the next five years? What challenges should be considered?
AI offers significant potential in speeding up diagnoses and improving early detection of diseases by analyzing large volumes of data quickly. It can assist in organizing patient care by identifying relevant trends or anomalies in patient data that would be time-consuming for doctors to analyze manually. However, AI’s current limitations lie in its inability to fully interpret complex data like a doctor can. For AI to be truly effective, data standardization is critical, and challenges remain in making AI “smarter” in interpreting this data. Over the next five years, AI is expected to enhance both diagnostic processes and the efficiency of healthcare organizations, allowing doctors to focus more on direct patient care.
A virtuous circle needs to be started, this includes doctors, patients and medical organizations to find new ways of working together, not only in Luxembourg but also in the greater region and in EU. This is where HWL opens some doors.
How can Luxembourg better support startups in the bio, medical, and health tech sectors?
Very often I have meetings with companies and they say, ‘if you provide me with some money, I will succeed.’ But that’s not true. Startups need more than just funding; they need to understand the healthcare system deeply. You have to talk to every person in this value chain… your innovation has to fit in with the processes.
Luxinnovation’s role is to connect startups with key stakeholders, such as hospitals and doctors, because if you don’t have these conversations, your innovation may just be a fancy dream. Events like Healthcare Week Luxembourg help startups meet doctors and other stakeholders which is why this year we are inviting doctors to visit startup booths to create a direct dialogue.
For more information on Healthcare Week Luxembourg’s programme, see here.