PRESS RELEASE

 ECME Announce Successful Recipients of COVID-19 Mini Projects Grants

 

 

 

24th JUNE 2020 – The Eastern Corridor Medical Engineering Centre (ECME) has announced the list of successful applicant companies under its recent Mini Projects First Call (COVID-19).   A total of nine awards were made to companies across the UK and Ireland which will see more that £300,000 in grant funding channelled into healthcare projects responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19 is having a significant impact on the research and innovation community, both in Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Scotland and internationally. ECME invited proposals which aligned with the challenge areas identified by the World Health Organisation including the provision of PPE equipment and the supply of rapid diagnostic kits.

The successful applicants were as follows:

  • 42 Genetics Ltd
  • Ad-vance Engineering Ltd
  • Anaeko Ltd
  • Biopanda Reagents Ltd
  • Digital Care System Ltd
  • ProAxis Ltd
  • PulseAI Ltd
  • S3 Connected Health Ltd
  • S2ACK Ltd

All of the funded projects have now commenced and will run for a period of 12 weeks.

Professor Jim McLaughlin, Head of the School of Engineering at Ulster University and also Programme Director for ECME said:

“We were very impressed by the response to the ECME COVID-19 Call both in terms of the number of applications received but also the readiness of the applicant companies to respond swiftly to the COVID-19 pandemic.   We strongly believe that the awards will help target the local and national response to the pandemic but also lead to longer term economic impact across the region, especially in the development of new products, platforms and expertise that will eventually be harnessed for future development beyond COVID-19.”

Dr Alexander Davey of Belfast-based Digital Care Systems was excited about how the ECME Mini Project grant would allow the company to develop their ‘Automation to Support Self-assessment of Illness Symptoms for Triage’ (ASSIST) platform:

“We are delighted to receive the excellent financial support offered under the ECME Mini Projects.  It will really allow us to move our chest pain triage platform closer to the needs of both patients and also the clinicians working in unscheduled care.   And the opportunity to collaborate with researchers across the ECME centres also adds real value to what our company is hoping to achieve with ASSIST”.

Speaking about the Programme Dr David Ribeiro, CEO of ProAxsis, said:

“The ECME lead partner, Ulster University, has a long-standing and successful heritage of creating value from their knowledge base, so we’re absolutely delighted to have the opportunity to work with them on the ECME Mini Projects, which we believe will produce highly commercially beneficial outputs.  We look forward to announcing updates on this collaborative project in the near future.”

The ECME Programme, including the Mini Projects are funded by the European Union’s Interreg VA Programme which is managed by the Special EU Programmes body (SEUPB).

 

ENDS/

 

 

ABOUT ECME

The Eastern Corridor Medical Engineering Centre (ECME) is a collaborative research project focusing on improving cardiovascular health. It is a partnership between five leading academic research centres, Ulster University, Dublin City University, University College Dublin, University of the Highlands and Islands, Dundalk Institute of Technology and the Southern Health & Social Care Trust.

ECME is funded by the European Union’s Interreg VA Programme which is managed by the Special EU Programmes body (SEUPB).  The €283m INTERREG VA Programme is one of 60 similar funding programmes across the European Union that have been designed to help overcome the issues that arise from the existence of a border. These issues range from access to transport, health and social care services, environmental issues and enterprise development.

 

Contact

Please contact Patrick Cullen at p.cullen1@ulster.ac.uk for further details.

 

The ECME Mini Projects are supported by the European Union’s INTERREG VA Programme, managed by the Special EU Programmes Body (SEUPB).