Houskapreis: 1st Place for JOANNEUM RESEARCH

Outstanding research: Our HEALTH institute received the winner’s trophy at the Houska Award ceremony. The MATERIALS institute took 4^th place.

Award ceremony: Managing Director Heinz Mayer and the researchers from HEALTH and MATERIALS who were honoured with the Houska Prize. Photo: Alexander Müller

400 guests from business and science attended the award ceremony for the Houska Award in the Aula der Wissenschaften in Vienna on 25 April. The HEALTH Institute was awarded 1^st prize, worth 150,000 euros, in the “Non-university research” category. The winning project, led by Katrin Tiffner, is dealing with the development of dermal open microperfusion for the detection of drug efficacy. In this innovative method, interstitial fluid is continuously removed from the skin using a minimally invasive probe. The collected fluid makes it possible to determine whether the drug penetrates the skin barrier, in what concentration it arrives in the skin and what effect it has there. This considerably speeds up the drug development and authorisation process, while at the same time significantly reducing costs.

Further awards

The MATERIALS institute was also honored for the NextGenMicrofluidics project “Next generation test bed for upscaling of microfluidic devices based on nano-enabled surfaces and membranes”. Project manager Martin Smolka and his team took the 4^th place.

The decide Clinical Software GmbH, a spin-off of JOANNEUM RESEARCH and the Medical University of Graz, also took third place in the “Research & Development in SMEs” category with GlucoTab: the software facilitates blood glucose management for patients with diabetes in hospital and also shows potential for use in mobile care.

The Houska Prize is awarded annually by the B&C Private Foundation to pioneering research projects.

More Information:

• B&C Private Foundation
• Open Flow Microperfusion
• NextGen Microfluidics
• GlucoTab

 

Contact

JOANNEUM RESEARCH Forschungsgesellschaft mbH- HEALTH
Katrin Tiffner
Katrin.Tiffner@joanneum.at

JOANNEUM RESEARCH Forschungsgesellschaft mbH- MATERIALS
Martin Smolka
Martin.Smolka@joanneum.at

www.joanneum.at