400 guests from business and science attended the award ceremony for the Houska Award in the Aula der Wissenschaften in Vienna on 25 April. Our HEALTH Institute was awarded 1st 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
Our MATERIALS institute was also honoured for the NextGenMicrofluidics project: project manager Martin Smolka und sein Team erreichten den 4. Platz. And 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.
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