NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence), the British agency that makes an analysis, generates quality standards and recommends optimal treatment regimens, drugs and medical equipment for the health care system, on the basis of their economic and medical efficiency for society, held an extended seminar for biomedical startups of Skolkovo on February 6th in Skolkovo Innovation Center.
This meeting was very important and comprehensive, especially for startups that plan to promote their projects on British and other European countries market. NICE activities are closely related to the work of all the main European regulators of pharma, medical equipment and clinical services market.
As Vice-President & Executive Director of the Biomedical Technologies Cluster of Skolkovo Foundation, Kirill Kaem mentioned at the opening of seminar, “Great Britain has very strong and highly developed social medicine, and getting knowledge about the best practices, our startups in future could generate correct requests to Skolkovo as well. This primarily applies to the issues of improving our legislation: we initiate changes continuing to talk about commercialization”.
Representatives of NICE Agency, Elizaveta Osipenko, Co-Director and member of Research Board, and Grace Jennings, Technical Adviser of British agency, emphasized an important point which should be clearly understood is that NICE is not the state regulator, “Our aim is to analyze pharmaceuticals from a security perspective for the patient which are already approved by regulator and consider only clinical result in terms of how it integrates in the health budget of the country, and how efficient it is from an economic point of view than what was done previously for the treatment of a disease”.
As a result, Jennings and Osipenko held the intensive six-hour seminar in Skolkovo with practical issues, highlighting a wide range of relevant issues. By the end of the workshop participants had an open debate in the form of Q&A session.