Mobile World Capital Barcelona backs technology transfer to accelerate business innovation processes

• RheoDx, a project that arose from research at the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica (Mathematics Research Centre, CRM) for diagnosing haematological diseases with just one drop of blood, is the first start-up to have been incorporated
• The application period for new entrepreneurs and scientists for The Collider 2018 starts today and the programme’s second edition will begin on November

July 18, 2018

Mobile World Capital Barcelona is completing the first cycle of The Collider, its technology transfer programme, which has been operative for 6 months. The Collider has featured 24 participants, 16 entrepreneurs, and 8 scientists and created 8 work groups to disseminate the results of research centres and turn them into market-ready products and services. Specifically, this first edition has seen the performance of 4 projects in the fields of big data, IoT, and blockchain.

The Collider 2017 has encouraged the creation of competitive, interdisciplinary groups (formed by scientific and entrepreneurial profiles with previous experience in developing business projects), with a view to maximising the opportunities for each scientific solution. After establishing the work groups last November, the teams had to overcome an initial phase of validating their proposals. They thereafter entered the venture building stage, which entailed turning these ideas into business projects. During this process, scientists and entrepreneurs received over 100 hours of training in which more than 100 companies such as Telefónica, Banco Sabadell, SocialCar and Doctoralia validated and developed their pilot programmes and over 20 investors, such as Javier González from Caixa Capital Risk, and Fabián Lares from JB Capital, were involved in the development of each solution.

Oscar Sala, director of The Collider states that “technology transfer enables us to create opportunities that the market does not create naturally in order to introduce society to the latest scientific innovations”. According to Sala, the direct application of the solutions arising from The Collider is one of the project’s basic characteristics and he concludes that “being the mobile world capital enables us to create a tailored environment to overcome market barriers and encourage scientists, entrepreneurs, and large corporations to work collaboratively in testing high-technology solutions, reinventing them and discovering new solutions that may have a direct impact on the day-to-day lives of people and companies”.

This is the case of RheoDx, the project that emerged from the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica and became a spin-off after passing through The Collider. Led by the biologist Samantha López, the telecommunications engineer Joan Grasas and the financier Oliver Balcells, RheoDx is a portable in-vitro device for immediate diagnosis of haematological diseases using just one drop of blood. The device, which combines microfluidic technology with big data to detect anomalies in blood cells, even now, in its pilot phase, involves institutions such as the Blood and Tissue Bank, the Josep Carreras Institute and Hospital Clínic.

Icaria Medical a device for real-time continuous measurement of blood pressure during surgery that does not require catheterisation; Torakku, a logistics application for monitoring and following-up objects using identification (RFID) and localisation (UWB) technologies; and Licence3D, which uses blockchain to protect files and register intellectual property, are the other projects developed in this first edition.

The Collider 2018

The Collider 2018 has emerged with the intention of increasing the participation of large corporations in the programme and is committed to encouraging the development of technologies such as artificial intelligence, IoT, blockchain and virtual reality, the development and impact of which will change with the arrival of 5G networks. This edition is, therefore, launching the “Connected Cities” challenge, which is focused on how these new technologies will influence our daily lives and improve people’s quality of life and the capacity of key industries.

The second edition of The Collider begins today with the start of the period for entrepreneurs and scientists to submit entries. In the first edition, over 300 applications were received from entrepreneurs from 41 countries, and from over 50 scientists with 12 nationalities.