BioInnovation Days 2018

BioInnovation Days 2018 was held on 27-28 April in Tartu, Estonia. The event brought together 98 participants including students, researchers, start-ups, mentors and speakers from Estonia, Latvia, Finland, Sweden, Greece, Italy, Slovakia, the Netherlands, and Norway.

The event was organized as a joint collaboration between BIOWAYS, EIT Health CAMPUS and ACCELERATOR, EstLat BioBoost and ePerMed projects, University of Tartu and many organizations.

During the hackathon, 8 teams were formed and 8 ideas in the fields of bio-economy and biomedicine developed during these 2 days with the help of mentors.

The 2nd day ended with all the teams pitching their ideas to the international jury. Altogether 6 awards were given out to the participants helping them to develop their ideas further.


Team StimulAid, aiming to develop a medical neurostimulator to help Parkinson’s patients improve their balance and mobility, was awarded EIT-Health Summer school travel grant in the value of 2500 EUR and Free consultancy from Tartu Biotechnology Science park. StimulAid founder and leader Nigul Ilves is an engineer at University of Tartu Institute of Clinical Medicine

Team MediKeep, developing a personalized medicine app to help people make more individualized health-related decisions (e.g about drugs, nutrition, lifestyle and prevention suggestions) based on their genomic data, was also awarded EIT-Health Summer school travel grant in the value of 2500 EUR.

Team Urban Vertical Farming, aiming to take empty apartment buildings in rural regions in use for growing agricultural products indoors using the newest technologies available got ERASMUS for Young Entrepreneurs scholarship in the value of 3300 EUR.

Team Milky Waste, developing a user-friendly and customizable equipment to the dairy companies, which can use it directly to produce biomethane and other valuable substances from the wastewaters of the dairy industry processes, got tickets to the sTARTUp Day 2019.

And finally, a special award, which is an all-expenses-paid trip to Japan to attend the NELIS Global Summit, was awarded to Lea Urpa from the University of Helsinki and from team Urban Vertical Farming, who demonstrated exceptional leadership skills during the event.