The National Health Innovation Centre, Singapore (NHIC), on October 17, launched a "Clinical Innovation and Adoption Initiative" to nurture potential life-saving healthtech projects for adoption and scaling across healthcare clusters in Singapore.

New initiative aims to keep Singapore at the forefront of clinical innovation by nurturing promising and cost-effective healthtech projects across the Singapore healthcare clusters and to develop local capabilities and platforms while attracting international aptitudes.

Under this new initiative, the projects selected will receive funding of up to S$1 million, subject to the scale and complexity of each project. NHIC will also work closely with the project teams to provide strategic guidance on regulatory policies and assist innovators along their commercialisation journey.

The initiative, supported by the Ministry of Health (MOH), will cover three clinical adoption themes: Screening, Diagnostics and Monitoring, and Intervention. The grant call for the first theme will open in November 2022. Neverthless, NHIC has expanded over the years under the funding support from MOH’s National Medical Research Council, and developed a robust track record in turning innovative healthcare research into commercial enterprises and products that improve patient care and healthcare delivery.

In 2020, NHIC was consolidated as a business unit under the Consortium for Clinical Research and Innovation, Singapore (CRIS) to facilitate synergies across the key national R&D, and clinical translation and service initiatives under MOH.

With the repositioning of NHIC as an integral part of CRIS, the centre has expanded its programmes from Clinical Innovation and Adoption Initiative, to establishing more publicprivate partnerships, especially at the early stages of the healthtech commercialisation journey. This includes the areas of venture co-creation and technology development, and the nurturing of tri-competent healthtech talent.

Venture Co-Creation and Technology Development Partnerships NHIC will be partnering with Origgin Ventures and Trinity Innovation Bioventure Singapore respectively, to co-create medtech and biotech start-ups arising from homegrown, cost-effective technologies. NHIC will also be working with Roche and MiRXES to establish open innovation partnerships to explore potential co-development opportunities for clinically and commercially impactful healthtech projects from an early stage.

Clinicians innovators will be able to identify viable commercial pathways for their healthtech innovations early on if they work closely with private sector partners. By strengthening public and private sectors through collaberations, NHIC would identify and support company’s healthcare objectives, while private sector partners will introduce a commercial discipline that will prepare the projects to become market-ready and investable.

The NHIC will partner with SGInnovate to nurture founders and senior innovation project leaders with clinical, technical and commercial experience in biotech and medtech. The program aims to cultivate Singapore’s biotech or medtech start-up innovators to encourage them to be innovation leaders and founders.