MEDICA Trade Fair 2023

The MEDICA Trade Fair 2023, confirmed its status as the world’s leading event for medical technology, bringing together key players in the health innovation ecosystem. For EFEVRE TECH, attending MEDICA was not just another international showcase, it was a strategic pivotal step for the development of the VITALE project, a step that was proven to be significant in advancing the company's strategic goals and the development of the software, both development wise and its long-term vision for smarter, data-driven laboratory ecosystems.

While the AMGEL device remains the cornerstone of the company’s hardware development efforts, the spotlight at MEDICA 2023 was shared by the VITALE software, an intelligent digital platform currently in development. With the increasing convergence of AI, automation, and healthcare, the MEDICA stage was the ideal environment to gather meaningful feedback and foster collaboration around this forward-thinking solution.

VITALE: Scientific Intelligence at the Core of Laboratory Innovation

Dr. Dimitris Kyriakou, CEO and Co-Founder of EFEVRE TECH, introduced VITALE to a targeted scientific audience during pre-selected arranged meetings and discussions at MEDICA. At the time, VITALE was in the active development phase, designed as a digital companion to AMGEL and as a standalone software system that brings automation, transparency, and intelligent decision-making into life-science laboratories. Attending this event at this phase of the project, would further expand VITALE's development opportunities at an early stage rather than pivoting at a later on development stage, avoiding delays.

The VITALE software's features were introduced to the new audience including:

Status: A centralized interface offering real-time overviews of ongoing protocol experiments, AMGEL device status, and pending tasks, which are designed to empower data-driven decisions and laboratory management.
Protocol Designer: A flexible tool for life-science researchers to build custom experimental workflows with precision and reproducibility in mind, allowing them to choose step timeline, step parameters, labware and liquid selection.
Protocol Library: A comprehensive repository of validated and shareable experimental protocols to promote standardization and knowledge transfer across laboratories. A filtering and sorting system offers user-friendliness and ease of experience.
Scheduling Calendar: An integrated scheduling calendar to organize protocol experiments, reserve the AMGEL device in the laboratory, and avoid protocol run overlaps and missed runs.
Personal Labbook: A digital laboratory notebook enabling seamless automated documentation, traceability, and collaboration. The Personal Labbook aims to battle reproducibility crisis by eliminating selective documentation.
AI Insights: An intelligent Artificial Intelligence assistant offering predictive analytics, anomaly detection, and experiment optimization suggestions. This serves as a tool to ultimately enhancing research accuracy, efficiency, and reproducibility.

Strategic Value That Gained Towards VITALE’s Development

While the VITALE presentation provided scientific engagement, the broader participation at MEDICA helped EFEVRE TECH establish critical infrastructure and support systems for the successful deployment of the platform. Notably:

Startup Campus Germany (scale-compass.com): This connection opens doors to the vibrant ecosystem in Germany, offering potential support in market entry, and networking opportunities with universities and research centers for the testing phase of the VITALE software.
Eurasanté (lille.eurasante.com): An accelerator specializing in Health-Nutrition innovations, further enriched our prospects. The discussions about research collaborations and early adopter testing with universities in the Hauts-de-France region are particularly valuable, since these can offer a significant input in the testing and research phase. These collaborations can provide critical feedback and validation for the proposed VITALE software, ensuring it meets the needs and expectations of its target users. Additionally, engaging with academic institutions through Eurasanté can lead to innovative advancements and improvements, enhancing the device’s efficacy and market appeal.
Fraunhofer (fraunhofer.de): This connection significantly advanced the progression of the VITALE software by providing access to Fraunhofer's extensive research and development expertise and facilities. Fraunhofer's cutting-edge technological capabilities and innovative solutions will offer valuable insights and support in refining the software.
Repado (repado.com): A software development company specializing in the Life-Science and Healthcare industries. Repado offers comprehensive software development and consultation services tailored to regulated environments, including MDR/IVDR compliance. The pre-arranged meeting at MEDICA was instrumental in advancing the proposed VITALE software project by providing specialized expertise in its software development and integration. Repado's capabilities in creating advanced software solutions allowed EFEVRE TECH to enhance VITALE’s overall functionality, allowing an immense improvement in the software’s user interface and system performance.

Overall, the attendance of the involved EFEVRE TECH team members at the MEDICA Trade Fair provided us with invaluable connections and opportunities, as expected, that significantly benefit the development of the AMGEL device. These strategic partnerships enhance manufacturing capabilities, provide access to innovation ecosystems, and ensure a robust supply chain, all of which are critical for the successful market entry and growth of the AMGEL device.

Real Feedback from a Real-World Audience

What made MEDICA an invaluable platform for VITALE was its ability to connect the development team with hands-on practitioners, clinical researchers, and healthcare innovators—individuals deeply familiar with the day-to-day challenges of laboratory workflows. These discussions generated a wealth of feedback that is now shaping the next phases of development.

Some key takeaways from the feedback included:

Customization demand: Researchers expressed strong interest in a modular and interactive dashboard where each user can tailor metrics relevant to their own usage of the account. This could potentially replace the status page, that will be seemed useful when no protocols running and theoretically the status page will be empty. An opportunity for a combination of dashboard and status page will be analyzed.
Protocol portability: Attendees emphasized the value of being able to share protocols across institutions and researchers, reinforcing the need for flexible format support and interoperability.
Offline functionality: For labs in regions with limited connectivity or high compliance requirements, the ability to access VITALE in offline or hybrid mode was considered critical. However, the development team will need to further research this topic, since offline options can cause critical security issues.

These insights are now guiding the refinement of VITALE’s user interface, data handling workflows, and collaborative features—ensuring the platform is both scientifically rigorous and highly usable.

Looking Ahead: VITALE’s Path to Pilot Deployment

With feedback from MEDICA Trade Fair 2023 now in hand, the next development phase for VITALE is focused on usability, compliance, and intelligent automation. The scientific conversations and technical consultations gathered during the fair have helped validate the platform’s direction while identifying practical needs from real users. Following this attendance, EFEVRE TECH is now moving towards further research to implement and develop the mentioned deployments, with several newly created research and healthcare partners.

The Project with the proposal number ENTERPRISES/0223/Sub-Call1/105 and project acronym VITALE is funded by the European Union Recovery and Resilience Facility of the NextGenerationEU instrument, through the Ίδρυμα Έρευνας και Καινοτομίας/Research and Innovation Foundation.