The Founder & Investor Talks organized by the Innovation Incubation Center (i²c) at TU Wien enable the audience to learn first-hand from experienced founders, investors, and innovators. They share their international experiences, dos and don’ts and lessons learned during inspiring talks and answer questions in interactive Q&A-sessions.
More about Ana Teresa Freitas
Ana Teresa Freitas is CEO and Co-founder of HeartGenetics, Genetics and Biotechnology SA, since 2013. Presently HeartGenetics is part of ImpactLab Group. She is also a Full Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Técnico Lisboa (IST), University of Lisbon. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer and Electronic Engineering. She has a degree in Innovation and Entrepreneurship from Católica School of Business and Economics. As a Professor at IST since 1995, she developed the Computational Biology field. Her scientific expertise is in the areas of Bioinformatics, Nutrigenetics, Human genetics, Health Informatics, Algorithms, and Data Mining.
In the context of the Computational Biology field in Europe, she was Vice-chair of the Board for 2017 and Board member (2010-2017) representing Portugal at ESFRI ELIXIR. ELIXIR unites Europe’s leading life science organisations in managing and safeguarding the increasing volume of data being generated by publicly-funded research.
The Talk will focus on the engineers abroad: adventures of an entrepreneur in the hostile lands of personalized medicine.
Personalized medicine is nowadays more than a buzzword, as it has become a vision that can be realized by building tools, interventions and products tailored to the individual person or patient, based on their predicted response or potential risk of disease.
A field with this description looks like the perfect space for engineers to intervene. This is particularly true if we think that any business around this topic should use digital technologies in order to be scalable and attract investment. Alas, things are not so simple and reality differs from this perception.
In this talk, Ana Teresa Freitas will present the work that, as an engineer, she has been developing at HeartGenetics, in the difficult field of personalized and preventive medicine. She will describe the adventure of moving from academia to the industry and how difficult it is to guarantee the convergence of several key factors: the engineer’s vision of a new medical product, the soundness of the underlying science, the need for patient-oriented medical practice, and, finally, the standardization and process efficiency needed to achieve scale and attract investors.
This event is part of ViennaUP, a unique festival with a series of online events organized by the community for the community of startups, investors, and talents. 40 partners create the ViennaUP´21-network, curated by the Vienna Business Agency. Participants from all around the globe have the opportunity to tune in to dozens of events across different industries and branches. You can sign-up for each event and create your individual ViennaUP´21-journey!
*** During the event, photographic and video material will be taken. Please inform the i²c team at the venue in case you do not agree with appearing in this material. The photographic and video material taken at the event will be used by i²c in printed and electronic media for promotional purposes.***
