It’s now the seventh year of the President’s Startup Challenge organization which support and fund those who won the competition. The setup of The Pistoia Alliance President’s Startup challenge group is to help start-ups in getting better healthcare innovation and changing research and development through funds supply and long-term collaboration.
This challenge that will take place at the annual conference of Alliance will comprise of two different parts which include – the first part for less-than-a-year old businesses coming up in April and the second and final part coming up in October for start-up businesses not more than three years old. To make this a success, Pistoia Alliance is looking for participants from existing accelerators, schools and groups.
The president of Pistoia Alliance, Dr Steve Arlington said “COVID-19 has placed worldwide attention firmly on R&D endeavours and the importance of collaboration to accelerate innovation”.
He added that “Never before have healthcare and life sciences been placed on the front page of every newspaper every day, making it important that we support R&D innovation at the earliest possible stage. The remodeling of our Startup Challenge reflects the wider efforts of the Pistoia Alliance to support this mission, from our Innovation Seed Fund to digital health hackathons. Nevertheless, life sciences innovation can’t hold in isolation; it requires the whole industry to work together. Through our reviewed challenge, we hope to make our members aware of this need and encourage their organizations to actively get involved.”
What prompts us to launch the President’s Startup Challenge this year is the success of those that won previously. Some of the winners include Arctoris, InSilicoTrials, Molecule.com, Cubuslab (now LabForward), Medexprim and Riffyn Nexus. These finalists are doing well and they have employed more than 200 people in total and have raised more than $50 million.
How It Works
Although there will be changes this year, this is how we’ve been running the event
All participants submitted entries online and they will be reviewed by associated industry professionals and Pistoia Alliance membership judges. After the review, five startups are chosen and asked to come to Boston for Pistoia Alliance’s US conference to:
- Partake in the startup support day to get feedback from a professional panel made up of investors, startups, consultancies and big pharma.
- Pitch at the conference to win the main prizes
Lastly, all finalists pitch their offering to those at the conference after winning $5000. Besides, every winner of the competition gets $20,000 and access to the judging and member network of Pistoia Alliance with support from the start-up network. This includes long term support, collaboration with industry professionals, boot camp courses and access to hackathons and accelerators and other new concepts generation corporations. The last finalists will get $5000 to improve on getting advanced solutions.
Pistoia Alliance innovation advisor, David Proudlock said, “As world economies hope to emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic more resilient, 2021 has exactly been named the ‘Year of the Start-up’, with particular room for innovation across R&D.” “Yet, start-ups will need more online support than 2020. If we have learnt anything from 2020, it’s that the advancement of medical devices and therapeutics is the whole industry’s responsibility. Simply funding start-ups is not enough to ensure their success any longer, which is why we are calling on academia and organizations to come together and support new ideas generation on the long-term.”
