1) Who are you?

Healint’s ambition is to disrupt chronic pain treatment methodologies for the sake of patients and be perceived as the leading reference actor of progress in that particular field. We want to reach this objective while providing collaborative, innovative user-centric solutions built to help patients better manage and reduce their chronic pain. To do so, we bring together our know-how in data science and our passion, to deliver technologies and solutions that empower patients, doctors, and researchers through their journey. In this light, we have created Migraine Buddy, an app that gathers more than 1.9 million users globally and helps patients manage their migraines and headaches. We continuously work towards improving Migraine Buddy while developing other disruptive solutions in healthcare with the patients as our consistent north star.

2) What is the story behind Healint?

The inspiration of Francois’ Cadiou, CEO and founder of Healint, arose out of a medical emergency, when his father suffered from a sudden stroke. He realized there were numerous uses of technology that would allow people to monitor behavior, stress and other factors that could potentially predict the onset of a medical episode. This could be for strokes or a complex condition like a migraine.
In 2014, he collaborated with top scientists and researchers to launch Migraine Buddy, which is now the top migraine tracking platform in the world with more than 1.9 million users. People use the Migraine Buddy app to track and record their migraine symptoms and conditions. The patient-reported outcomes, generated via the platform, helps patients understand their condition, and get the best possible diagnosis, treatment, and insights for research and clinical trials.

3) What is your company motto?

By striving towards optimizing the way we listen to patients and understanding the full circle of chronic pain management, we aim to improve the quality of life and put the power of technology in the patient’s hands.

4) What are your company’s biggest challenges?

Built on technology, we have created a user-centric program involving multiple stakeholders (patients, doctors, researchers, and lab). This platform facilitates chronic pain understanding, and helps patients find personalized solutions with their different health partners. The main challenge we face is to grow and be able to hire the best human talent to dynamically support and grow a global user base, even further with the level of stakeholder management required.

5) What made you want to join the InnoPeaks program?

We were attracted by the digital transformation strategy that aims to position Groupe Mutuel as a customer’s life partner and we were particularly interested in the way Groupe Mutuel is aiming to create seamless healthcare services through partnerships with start-ups focused on personalized treatment, preventive care and personalized life coaching.
With our database of proven users in Switzerland, and our already implemented coaching solutions with other corporate clients, who are also based in Switzerland; we believe that we can bring major added value in improving the Swiss healthcare ecosystem at our level.

1) Who are you?

Check Your Health is a Swiss startup from Lausanne in the field of digital health. We empower consumers to take ownership of their health, with easy and affordable testing kits in order to get understandable results from the comfort of their home.

2) What is the story behind Check Your Health?

Following a frustrating medical journey experience, our Founder thought there had to be a better way to make lab testings easy, accessible, undertandable and affordable – for any consumer. Today, being proactive about your health is tedious: waiting for hours in doctors’ waiting rooms, paying exorbitant and unexpected medical bills, and receiving incomprehensible lab test results, without any personalized interpretation. We want to make this better, easier and above all consumer-centered!

3) What is your company motto?

We empower you to own and understand your health, in an easy, convenient and affordable way.

4) What are your company’s biggest challenges?

Check Your Health has developed an MVP which is ready for the market. Our challenge today is to identify our consumer personas and how to reach them via tailored marketing campaigns, SEO, and other B2B2C e-commerce promotion strategies.

5) What made you want to join the InnoPeaks program?

As the African proverb says “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”. Innopeaks is a unique opportunity for Check Your Health to grow in an ecosystem with innovative startups from around the world, interact with passionate and inspiring people and meet experts in the field of health, prevention, and insurance. There are not many opportunities like Innopeaks in Switzerland, so Check Your Health is very grateful to have been selected by InnoPeaks and Groupe Mutuel to be part of this acceleration program.

1) Who are you?

I am Semira Gonseth Nusslé, CEO of Genknowme SA, and mother of two. I am an executive in an academic institution, Unisanté, formerly the CHUV (in the top ten hospitals in the world) and a Swiss researcher, medical doctor by training, board-certified in prevention and public health. I have several years of clinical experience in prevention, in particular for tobacco smoking. My husband and co-founder, Sébastien Nusslé, is a PhD graduate in biostatistics, specialized in gene versus environment interactions in fish populations. After a four-year postdoctoral research stay in UC-Berkeley, he became the director of the Swiss Fisheries Advisory Office, then number three in one of the largest environmental consulting firms in Switzerland.

We developed this business idea during our four-year postdoctoral stay at the University of California San Francisco and Berkeley, where I investigated the epigenetic links between cancer and lifestyle risk factors. There, we also developed our entrepreneurial skills by joining the UC Berkeley’s incubator (SkyDeck). We moved back to Lausanne in 2017 to materialize this project in Switzerland with the help of Innovaud, the Office of transfer of technology of the CHUV-UNIL, and InnoSuisse.

We feel extremely motivated to carry out this project because we are confident it has the potential to become a game changer in healthcare and we believe in its great success potential. In our opinion, it will inherently revolutionize the management of preventive medicine and pave the way for a new generation of epigenetic tests that will improve diagnosis and monitoring in medicine and public health, while providing cost control.

2) What is the story behind GenKnowMe?

Genknowme is dedicated to transform breakthrough research and clinical science into actionable personalized tools. We are developing a simple blood test that identifies key biogenetic markers to track, maintain, and improve biological age and longevity. Epigenetics is what enables every cell to act specifically despite having identical DNA sequence. Epigenetic information includes not only genetics, but also gene expression and regulation – unlike genetics, epigenetics is actionable. Studies reveal that lifestyle changes have a substantial effect on gene expression and regulation. Genknowme has identified key biological markers involved in the genetic expression of aging regulation and has developed a product designed to help everyone age more healthily. In the future, we expect that epigenetic testing will be globally used as a comprehensive health assessment, identifying individual risk factors, chronic diseases prognosis and offering personal recommendation and medication to stay healthy and optimize everyone’s youth capital. For the first time in health prevention programs, individuals can do more than hope for the best, or fear the worst – they can act and monitor the effects of their daily choices.

3) What is your company motto?

What drives us is the will to be part of the epigenetic revolution and to democratize scientific knowledge for the greater good.

4) What are your company’s biggest challenges?

Epigenetics is a very innovating and promising scientific field. Therefore, explaining how breakthrough research and clinical science can be transformed into actionable personalized tools will be one of our major challenges. Another challenge is that epigenetics, being associated with genetics, raise similar concerns regarding personal data & privacy management. Our test is not DNA sequencing, as we only analyze specific epigenetic markers that are additions to some parts of the DNA. Only the specific markers needed to measure biological age and the factors that impact it will be analyzed. Nevertheless, we will be addressing these issues with the highest standards and a strong commitment. Additionally, we will be looking for external third-party independent auditors to regulate our security procedures.

5) What made you want to join the InnoPeaks program?

The InnoPeaks program offers first-class mentoring, masterclasses, a strong network of business partners and collaborators, access to the most active VCs and Angel investors in our industry, as well as an amazing infrastructure, among other advantages. In just one week, we already had numerous valuable introductions with leaders, entrepreneurs and CEOs from the Insurtech, Digital Health & Fintech industries, making this a way in a very unique ecosystem in Switzerland.

Crédit photos : ©Zuzanna Adamczewska-Bolle

Xavier Comtesse is a key influencer in Switzerland and innovation specialist, a seasoned visionary of healthcare’s digital evolution and revolution, as well as a mathematician and doctor of computer science. He enjoys a first-class reputation in Switzerland and is a mentor and adviser for the InnoPeaks project. He opened the first Swissnex office in Boston in 2000 and founded HEALTH@LARGE in 2015, a think tank focusing on healthcare in the digital age, with other experts.

Latest publications: Health 4.0 – The Digital Tsunami (2017) and IA – Entreprise augmentée, médecine augmentée (2018).

Towards personalized medicine

By agreeing to get involved in the InnoPeaks project, Xavier Comtesse is right where he likes to be: in the healthcare sector that is about to be disrupted by the technology revolution. Major changes are on their way!

Because of digital technology and artificial intelligence, innovation is gaining momentum and boundaries are being redefined. Today, genomics are combined with neuroscience; big data are merged with algorithms and social networks with the Internet of Things…  More and more, technological achievements are helping to redefine the meaning of prevention and patient experience, allowing us to see what tomorrow’s medicine will be like: customised or precision medicine.

Data will change everything

“As you know, data is at the very heart of the technology or digital revolution.  A computer keyboard is able to predict two years in advance if you will be affected by Parkinson’s disease, by analysing how you hit the keys! », said Xavier Comtesse.

The technological revolution is a shift in paradigm. “It is like shifting from photography to cinema, the world is changing”, he added.

InnoPeaks and the digital transformation

According to Xavier Comtesse, InnoPeaks is fully in line with the digital transformation that is taking place in the health sector, thanks to its innovating projects based on themes related to the digital revolution in the health insurance system, such as competitiveness and performance, security, experimentation, customer and patient experience, health technology, connected objects, genetics, prevention and artificial intelligence.

All players will need to redefine their position. Xavier Comtesse is convinced of this: “Small players, such as flexible and fast-moving start-ups, will be offering new services… Today, a company must be able to capture new trends and developments, and to know how to recognise the gems of the future. That is why InnoPeaks is so important!”

Linking DNA to big data

Personalized medicine is increasingly becoming a reality thanks to connected objects that are generating massive amounts of data. “By linking this increasing amount of data to DNA, something huge is going to happen. To succeed in combining the history of each one of us with one’s DNA will help to define precision medicine, which is at the crossroads of these two areas. Big data, or acquired information, is the history and DNA is innate information, which is a form of big data in itself. Once again, processing information is at the heart of these concerns”, concluded Xavier Comtesse.

Let’s get started!

Xavier Comtesse added that “prevention is now ever more important and becoming a continuum. Everyone’s role is set to change. Insurers will be providing increasingly personalised services to their customers. However, we are still a long way from what will be able to do tomorrow. So, let’s get started!”

For start-ups, InnoPeaks is a further step forward towards a revolution that has already begun.

The first InnoPeaks Demo Day was held on 15 March 2019 in Sion, in the brand new service centre of Groupe Mutuel. The event was the culminating point of a 12-week programme aimed at accelerating startups in healthcare and insurance technology.

The culminating point of InnoPeaks

Some 140 persons attended the event that was held on 15 March in Sion.

Nine startups from seven countries summarised the results of their hard work through a series of convincing and intensive pitches.

The event was a platform for discussion and the opportunity to develop new partnerships and business contacts. The Demo Day also served to strengthen the ability of startups to deliver pitches and to convince partners to enter potential collaboration opportunities.

It was a challenge on both an academic and networking level and included exchanges with health professionals or providing support in terms of innovation.

A high-level panel brought together Paul Rabaglia, Chief Executive Officer of Groupe Mutuel, Xavier Comtesse, author, as well as a mentor at InnoPeaks and a co-founder of HEALTH@LARGE, and Nicolas Loeillot, Chief Innovation Officer at Groupe Mutuel. The three panellists presented ideas for future challenges and the major trends in health technology and user experience. Afterwards, the debate was opened to a particularly attentive audience.

The audience was of course one of the main focuses of the Demo Day. It included all people met during the programme, the various communities, mentors, investors, talents, prospects, media, as well as representatives of the Fusion team, which organized the event, Idiap and Groupe Mutuel.

The meetings and exchanges were many and varied, ranging from discussions during the panel and questions from the audience after each pitch, to one-to-one exchanges during the cocktail that followed. Ultimately, the event saw the creation of a genuine community of like-minded individuals.

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The Demo Day also marks the beginning of a relationship with Groupe Mutuel for startups, in a form that is always unique.

Once entrepreneurs have acquired a good understanding of the Swiss business environment, including of its players and market opportunities, they can better assess their startup business model and consider projects in collaboration with different companies. In this case, with Groupe Mutuel.

For Groupe Mutuel, it is the opportunity to highlight and showcase the work carried out, both internally and externally, as well as to engage with motivated and ambitious business people. For entrepreneurs, the challenge is precisely to make successful connections between their startups and the large companies in attendance.

Though the Demo Day, Groupe Mutuel shows that it is committed to innovation, by encouraging talented people to join the programme. It’s a real challenge for a company today to attract talent in Switzerland, in the current tough competitive environment.

Therefore, Groupe Mutuel is committed to innovation and taking significant initiatives. It calls itself into question, attempts to anticipate the future and strives to improve its processes and services.

The response to Demo Day? Energy, vitality, conviction, confidence: watch the videos. If an image is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a thousand photos.

 

“The aim of Demo Day is to show the world, the community involved or others who may be interested, the result of the startup acceleration process. It also marks the beginning of a working relationship with Groupe Mutuel, conveying the following message: you are now ready to work with us!” Nicolas Loeillot, CIO Groupe Mutuel