19 October 2020
Karger is granting the Vesalius Innovation Award for the first time in 2020. It promotes talented young scientists and entrepreneurs who are involved in early-stage startups which are developing innovative solutions for the huge evolving needs of the Health Sciences ecosystem in the fields of science publishing and communication. Participating startups are mentored by Karger Publishers and the advisory board members of the award. Last week, the five finalist startups made their pitches and impressed the jury with their innovative ideas. These five finalists were selected by the advisory board:
- 4D Interactive Anatomy combines the advantages of digital tools with real cadaver dissections. In this way, it facilitates online anatomy education.
- MagmaLearning summarizes any content automatically and generates a series of relevant questions (quizzes) using cutting-edge natural?language processing. It then allows readers to consolidate their knowledge by personalizing the learning process.
- MediFind integrates health information from dozens of disparate medical datasets and then makes that information understandable to patients.
- Scholarcy extracts structured data and knowledge summaries from scholarly content. These summaries allow users to identify and verify the key findings and sources from research papers.
- Scite helps researchers better discover and evaluate scientific articles through "Smart Citations" that indicate whether a citation provides supporting or disputing evidence for the cited claim.
The vision for the Vesalius Innovation Award comes from the work of entrepreneurial and innovative surgeon Andreas Vesalius, who laid the foundation for entirely new insights into the anatomy of the human body with his major publication De humanis corporis fabrica in 1543. Today, Health Sciences publishing is going through a similar innovative and disruptive transformation, which has been accelerated dramatically by COVID-19 publishing imperatives, as well as the shift towards Open Science and the increasing use of diverse intelligent digital technologies in healthcare. Researchers, doctors, patients, health policymakers, governments, and many other stakeholders are both creating and desiring fast versatile access to a vast number of knowledge resources with new suitable publishing technologies. This award is designed to highlight and stimulate entrepreneurs to respond to these Health Sciences publishing needs.
„Investing in innovative startups potentially gives Karger access to technology innovation to expand our business into broader parts of the Health Sciences knowledge cycle. This in turn enables us to better support our stakeholders who are at the center of everything we do“, says Daniel Ebneter, CEO at Karger Publishers.
On 3 December 2020, the advisory board will decide which startup will win the award at a STM online event.