Many may not be aware but outside of Finland’s charm as a Nordic country, Finland is also famous for something else. Due to its relatively small population, Finland is Europe’s digital health epicenter, among the leading countries in digitalization and innovation.

With the help of Business Finland, Daewoong Pharmaceutical arranged meetings with 30 companies in December last year.

The company will be visiting Finland next month for another event called Radical Health Festival Helsinki.

Radical Health Festival Helsinki, scheduled to be held from June 12-14, is a first-time event that will promote the themes of artificial intelligence, mental health, the effects of climate change on health, active aging, cybersecurity, innovation, and the digitalization of the health sector. The event is expected to be well-attended by many European-based healthcare companies.

“Like Korea, Finland’s hospital services are 100 percent digitalized,” Yang Sung-eun, head of Daewoong Pharmaceutical’s Connected Collaboration & Development Innovation said, revealing the company’s interest in visiting Finland. “As many of the start-ups we are currently investing in have digital health-related projects, cooperating with Finland is the perfect gateway for Korean start-ups specializing in digital healthcare to enter Europe.”

Finland as a leader in digital health innovation

Business Finland, which is a public-sector operator under the Finnish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment with 40 offices based overseas, has been facilitating customer exchanges with foreign companies that wish to invest in Finland.

Peter Bae, Business Finland's Senior Advisor, said before Covid-19, the organization worked with Celltrion to help establish a sales branch office in Helsinki because Celltrion possessed a strong foothold in Europe for their biopharmaceutical business. “We are now working very closely with Daewoong Pharmaceutical,” Bae said.

According to Finland Toolbox, Finland is one of the first countries in the world to set up a national digital patient data repository covering both the public and private healthcare sectors. In particular, they possess a 30-year history of sample collection exists, 100 percent digitized patient records, and biobank data is combinable with patient records and national healthcare registries, noted Bae.

“All this is backed up by universal healthcare, homogeneous care guidelines, and legislation providing access to health data,” he explained.

Consequently, the Finns rank among the three strongest health-technology economies in the world, with digital health as its largest high-tech export.

“Therefore, we can cooperate with Korean healthcare companies in R&D and biobank data services,” explained Bae. “We are working with Daewoong to facilitate mutual R&D with Finnish companies.”

Participating companies at Radical Health Festival Helsinki

At Radical Health Festival Helsinki, nine Korean companies including Daewoong Pharmaceutical alongside six of its Korean start-ups and two other companies selected by Business Finland, are scheduled to attend.

These companies are interested in attending the festival to study the EU market through Finland and will showcase their prototype products to Finnish investors or other European potential partners, Yang said.

Huniverse and ezCaretech are the two firms chosen by Business Finland. 

Huniverse created Korea’s first precision medicine hospital information systems on the cloud by developing various modules. 

ezCaretech is a leading electronic health record (EHR) platform company, providing a broad range of modules for hospital operations.

“They are perfect candidates for taking advantage of Finland’s digitized hospital information systems,” Bae said.

Meanwhile, the six start-up companies that Daewoong Pharmaceutical will carry to Finland include BRLab, eMotiv, MediIOT, Neurive, BIGS SPRING TREE, and Seers.

“We do not develop our digital therapeutics but we are interested in investing in these start-up companies and helping connect them with the global and domestic market, such as small and mid-sized companies in Finland,” emphasized Yang.

BRLab is a company specializing in sleep tech with advanced sleep analysis solutions to enhance deep sleep, strengthen memory consolidation, prevent dementia, relieve sleep apnea and insomnia, and correct sleeping posture among others.

Additionally, eMotiv has digital therapeutic solutions to quickly screen and assess the user’s ADHD through mobile games. MediIOT uses an electronic medicine platform to treat dry eye syndrome (DES) with a wearable eye device which requires less treatment time compared to its competitors.

‘Finland stands ready to partner with Korean start-ups’

Yang also pointed out that although there are many other European countries to consider for partnering, Finnish companies are the most willing to partner with Korean start-ups.

Daewoong’s open collaboration strategy is focused on working with experts in digital therapeutics, biologics like antibodies or stem cell therapies, and new drug discovery companies.

“We met with over 30 companies last year firstly to give the Korean start-ups that we are currently investing in, an opportunity to meet partner companies in Finland and help them enter the European market,” said Yang, referring to their visit to Finland in December. “Secondly, we wanted to find a company that Daewoong could invest in, especially in the areas of digital therapeutics applied to diseases like depression or ADHD.”

On the first visit to Finland last year, Daewoong met with companies including Medified, Stemsight, Solani Therapeutics, and other companies in incubators in Finland. However, this time around, the start-ups are hoping to meet a wider range of companies as Radical Health Festival Helsinki will allow them to greet a wider European audience.