Towards the end of last year, the winners of the 16th Amsterdam Science and Innovation Award (AmSIA) were announced at the NEMO Science Museum.
This contest is sponsored by — Innovation Exchange Amsterdam (IXA) — Three innovative ideas from the Netherlands each year. These fall into his three categories: health, society, environment and climate.
This event doesn't just shine a spotlight on the fascinating people behind these inventions, it also helps make them a reality. For the winners, this means not only a prize of €10,000 in funding, but also access to a community of experts who will help them grow.
Here at TNW, we're always excited about what's at the forefront of European technology. That's why we spoke to three award winners to find out more about their work.
Health Category Winner: Dr. Zeliha Güler and Wound Healing Implants
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Dr. Zeliha Guler is a senior researcher and principal investigator in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at UMC Amsterdam.
She received an AmSIA Health Award for her research on dissolvable implants for the treatment of pelvic organ prolapse (POP).
“POP is a multifactorial disease characterized by a weakened pelvic floor due to decreased tissue strength and decreased quality of the extracellular matrix,” says Guler.
The main cause of pelvic floor disease is childbirth, and “women who have given birth and women over age 50 may have an increased risk of POP by up to 60%.”
POP is usually treated using the patient's own tissue material. Unfortunately, 25% of women will need another surgery because the tissue quality is compromised and the wound does not heal properly. In case of recurrence, permanent implants are used to treat POP, but they can cause clinical complications.
Guler's team believed they could solve this problem with dissolvable implants, but that wasn't enough.
She told me that she and her team are “working with degradable knit implants to eliminate or minimize clinical complications.”
They found that these provide excellent mechanical support, but are very different from natural tissues. At this point, she thought: electrospinning She “realized the ability to mimic the natural cellular environment and improve compatibility with cells.”
Furthermore, we added estrogen to the scaffold to promote tissue healing after surgery.
This approach was successful and she won the Health Category Award.
But what is Guler's next step? That's growth.
She told me, “We want the attention and cooperation of medical device companies to support comprehensive, long-term follow-up of patients.” [their] Electrospinning (ES) scaffold. ”
Beyond this, Guler would like to explore commercialization and widespread distribution of the technology. This includes not just POP, but anything that can be used to heal any type of wound.
Not to mention how big an impact it has.
Social Sciences Winner: Pepin van Rutten and the Laughing Gas Detector
Pepin van Rutten, winner of the Amsterdam Prize for Science and Innovation in the social category, is part of the team that developed the laughing gas detector Respira.
When I spoke to him, Van Rutten explained the problems the Netherlands is having with laughing gas.
“Incidents have increased more than tenfold,” he told me. “Sadly, this results in more than 120 serious injuries and 20 deaths each year. [the country] alone. “
He went on to say that while there are reliable testing methods for alcohol and most other drugs, this is not the case for laughing gas.
“That's why we're developing breathalyzers,” Van Rutten says.
He and his team hope it will have a powerful preventive effect, as drivers know they can be caught using drugs, much like alcohol testing did in the past.
“In this way, our sensors can reduce the number of accidents, create safer roads and save lives.”
Van Rutten said he and his team were inspired by Dutch news reports about an increasing number of people driving under the influence of laughing gas. This was a great motivator.
They wanted to “make a positive impact on society by making our roads safer” and hoped they could develop technology to reverse this trend.
these are the roots Respira.
Van Rutten and his colleagues, working in a team of three at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam's demonstrator lab, want Respira to be “as easy to use, reliable, and accurate as possible while being affordable.” I focused on making it.
They achieved something to some extent.
Following this win and the €10,000 in funding, the team plans to create an even smaller and more robust prototype, but they are even more excited about what will happen next.
“We have big plans for the future. Our technology can also be easily applied to the detection of other chemicals in exhaled breath, for example biomarkers associated with certain diseases.” says Van Rutten.
This means that research teams can technically develop a cheap and easy way to breath test for diseases in humans and animals before the first symptoms appear.
“We believe that the development of our laughing gas sensor is the first step in building a breath analysis platform aimed at building a safer and healthier society,” says Van Rutten.
Who can argue with that?
Winner in the Environment and Climate category: Olivier Rougier and sustainable nanoparticle production
nanoparticles It has the potential to be a lifeline for a vast number of fields, including everything from biomedicine to sustainable energy production, but there's a problem. I mean, it's incredibly complex.
This is the question that Olivier Rougier, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam, set out to address with his team.
The complex nature of nanoparticles is both a blessing and a curse.
Sure, it provides products with properties that can solve problems, but “its complexity makes it possible to avoid relying on contaminant solvents and cumbersome manufacturing methods that often result in unreliable products.” It will also be difficult to manufacture products,” Olivier Rougier told me.
Rougier and his team have devised a device and procedure that allows them to easily produce large numbers of nanoparticles. This can be achieved in one step without the use of solvents. This is a huge improvement from the current situation.
The goal, Rougier said, is to turn nanoparticles from expensive laboratory materials into elements that can actually be used in everyday devices.
The inspiration for this project came from Dr. Stefania Grecia, Group Leader in Functional Materials.
“She thought about combining multiple physicochemical processes into one to synthesize functional materials,” Rougier says. “When we realized that advanced core-shell nanoparticles could be produced in a single step without the use of solvents, we saw the potential and decided to continue developing this method and prototype device.”
Winning this award could have major implications for Rougier and his colleagues. Next steps include doing everything we can to improve our technology and optimize our processes.
In parallel, they have launched a startup called Nano Hybrids to help commercialize the nanoparticles, and are currently in the process of incorporating.
Once this is achieved, the group hopes that nanoparticle technology will no longer remain in the laboratory but can be used to improve society as a whole.
final thoughts
It can be easy to feel gloomy and depressed about the state of the world, where big corporations seem to be burning the earth in search of profit. That's why it's so heartening to read about schemes like the Amsterdam Prize for Science and Innovation.
Here you can get a glimpse into the world of scientists and researchers who are doing everything they can to change the world.
They are developing technology today that will define the technological world of tomorrow. That is wonderful.