Creative Collisions Program Shaping Innovation
by Meena Masilamani, Director of Content at Montreal NewTech
CREATIVE COLLISIONS was born in 2019, the brain child of Montreal NewTech (MNT) that leverages the cumulative learning from our proactive support for the start-up ecosystem in the last 10 years which includes over 100+ demo nights showcasing the start-up and tech talent in our community.
It’s an ambitious experiment that explores the cross-pollination and synergies found in converging two emerging and trans-formative technologies. Each year these two technologies will be chosen independently. We bring together a dynamic group of: researchers, scientists, industrial experts and start-ups from two chosen revolutionary fields in the hope of generating unique opportunities and serendipitous moments to shape innovation and collaboration.
The premier Creative Collision in 2019 was in partnership with Fintech Cadence which championed the cross-roads of fin-tech and green-tech. Due to its enormous success that included 100+ participants in attendance and engagement from the community, we’re launching an entire series of Creative Collision that we hope will empower and galvanize our start-up ecosystem.
MNT debuted it’s first event of the new decade and the second in the series on Thursday, January 23rd aptly named: “Creative Collisions — The intersection of Biosciences & AI” in partnership with District 3.
Permeating our everyday lives, AI based technologies are shaping our experiences and redefining the world we live in. Start-ups, companies and governments are employing AI technology to develop solutions that execute intelligent decisions, enhance human creativity, optimize costs, complete high-precision operations and more.
Life science start-up’s and research, as the name attests, endeavor to improve and enrich people’s lives through advancements in health care. The life or bio sciences spectrum covers everything from: synthetic biology, therapeutics, digital health, diagnostics, medical devices, food technology like clean meat, platforms and tools.
Consequentially, the new generation of start-ups are exploiting AI to advance and pursue progress in life sciences and health care.
Creative Collisions Biosci + AI, kicked-off with our host, Ilias Benjelloun, President at MNT, introducing the start-up’s and panelists.
“MNT recognizes that the key to meaningful impact and innovation stems from diversity and inclusion — this includes diversity of all types: genders, ethnic backgrounds, multi-disciplines, cognitive diversity and acknowledging other points of views. Mindful of this, we at MNT, strive to incorporate all forms of diversity in each and every one of our events. This originates from our multi-cultural and cross-functional team to the partnerships, founders, start-up’s and communities we engage with,”- Ilias Benjelloun
The event commenced with Reverse Pitches, a novel concept whereby enterprises and start-up support organizations pitch their value propositions in contrast to the normal pitches whereby start-up’s pitch their business models.
Here’s a short recap of the stimulating discourse that burgeoned from the panel talks:
There was consensus among the panelists, comprised of entrepreneurs, start-up’s, researchers and industrialists that the current status quo in the health care system with all it’s inefficiencies and high costs cannot continue and isn’t sustainable. And that while advancement in technology is important but that we also need to recognize the drawbacks. They agree that the future for delivering quality health care at a lower cost resides in prevention of illness versus a curative approach. These are some of the takeaway thoughts and ideas from the panel:
· The rise in AI and it’s applications could potentially lead to increased efficiencies in the health care system. However, there will be intense scrutiny over data privacy of the patient information. It’s a challenge for the life sciences startups to access personal health data from hospitals, while there is a need to be respectful of the privacy of the individuals involved.
· In the future,AI has the potential to simplify healthcare diagnostics. For example, right now in order to diagnose a pathology, you need human expertise to go through microscopic slides or X-Rays and evaluate. Whereas, with advancements in AI and availability of pathology databases, pathologists can potentially feed the visual data from the slides-into an AI based software that will determine and assist the diagnosis.
· The inherent heterogeneous and rich multi-cultural make-up of the Canadian population offers an unfair advantage to life science start-up’s and researchers to collect a diversity and variety of data for the life sciences sector. Representation is imperative, for example in developing drugs that are effective in a wider population. Often, lack of data samples from a certain sub-group of the population biases the products being developed to work for the typical group.
Below is a list of the Entrepreneurs, Founders, Start-up’s and Researchers that were presented at Creative Collisions:
Montreal InVivo, represented by Farrah Bendahmane, Director and Enterprise Devolopment
Montreal Invivo represents the Life sciences and Health Technologies (LSHT) cluster of Greater Montréal. We are a non-profit economic development organization that aims to create a business environment that fosters innovation, growth and competitiveness of the public and private organizations in the LSHT sector.
Altus Formulation, represented by Damon Smith, CEO
Altus Formulation is a drug formulation and development start-up leveraging their patented drug delivery technologies to provide innovative, cost-effective and safer to use formulations for their clients and their patients.
Altasciences, represented by Anahita Keyhani, Senior Director Scientific Operations
Altasciences is a forward-thinking, mid-size contract research organization, offering biopharmaceutical companies of all sizes a proven, flexible approach to early drug development including preclinical safety testing, clinical pharmacology, bioanalysis and research services
VitalTracer, represented by Azadeh Dastmalchi, CEO & Co-Founder
VitalTracer is a healthcare start-up introducing a wrist band that produces a data which is capable of measuring vitals such as ECG signal, PPG signal, Accelerometer signal, Gyroscope signal and Skin temperature with an easy to use design.
McGill University, represented by Professor Jake Barralet, Vice Chair (Research) Department of Surgery
Professor Jake Barralet is working on ground-breaking research on regeneration of blood vessels to help save patient lives.
“My reason for participating in Creative Collisons is the huge power in cognitive diversity, this room is filled with researchers, entrepreneurs, enterprises, support organizations…and I’m here to talk to as many people as possible. For sure, there’ll be those whose outlook and perspective [on my research] will be invaluable and who will SEE more than I do.” — Professor Jake Barralet
PerceivAI, represented by Christian Dansereau, CEO & Founder
Perceiv is an AI-based digital biomarkers start-up specializing in the field of precision medicine. They are dedicated to helping improve and saving patient lives through more efficient, accurate, subject targeting, and objective prognosis through advanced machine learning algorithms
PLAKK, represented by Nicolas Bent, CTO
PLAKK is a start-up that harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to make characterizing atherosclerotic plaque features and plaque stability faster, more accurate and more accessible to researchers and physicians.
We’re elated with the reception and engagement Creative Collisions received: with 170 registrations and over 150 participants that comprised of a positive balance of researchers, entrepreneurs and professionals, the event catered to diverse POV’s and ignited an animated debate.
If you’re interested in the life sciences and want to learn how to get started in this field, we encourage you to reach out to our partner District 3 — they have solid expertise in this domain and have helped countless researchers, PhD and masters students to set-up their own start-ups.
We thank our friends and co-organizers: D3 Center (District 3 Innovation Center), Hi2 (Health Innovation Initiative), Montréal InVivo, CQIB (Quebec Life Sciences Incubator & Accelerator), MEI (Ministère de l’Économie et de l’Innovation), EY and Coopérathon.
Our next Creative Collisions will be sure to explore the intersection of two new emerging fields. Stay tuned for updates with: MNT’s NEWSLETTER or sign-up for our events calendar.
