New Attractive Innovation Project Award winners announced

2022-10-25

The team behind Virubustor is one of the new recipients of UU Innovation's Attractive Innovation
Project Award. Photo: Mark Harris.

From an app that makes life easier for doctors to a new technique for cleaning the air inside vehicles, UU Innovation has announced four new winners of the Attractive Innovation Project Award among staff and students at Uppsala University.

With the Attractive Innovation Project Award, UU Innovation acknowledges projects and startups that have made an important contribution to taking ideas into the development phase, for example, by securing external investment. In all cases, it rewards external recognition of the potential of an innovative solution that the project has developed or laid the foundations for.

The projects, all of which have received early-stage support from UU Innovation, receive a diploma and bouquet. These are the latest projects to receive the accolade:

RoundBit
Dendrit is a digital tool developed to replace the reams of paper currently used by doctors to organise their tasks. The aim is to make the everyday life of a doctor easier by allowing them to share medical records, gain an overview of their workflow and create customised checklists. Dendrit has been commercialised by RoundBit, one of the founders of which is Dr Fredrik Junerfält, an alumnus of the Faculty of Medicine at Uppsala University. The company completed its first sale during 2022.

Learn more: They want to develop healthcare from within

Virubustor
Colleagues Marvin Seibert and Kerstin Mühlig, researchers at the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, have developed a new air purification solution that can be implemented quickly and cheaply in many different vehicles. The technique draws heat from the vehicle’s engine to sterilise the air and remove aerosols that may contain infectious agents such as coronaviruses. In order to commercialise the technology, the researchers have built a team and founded the company Virubustor. UU Invest AB has joined two other investors in supporting the project.

Learn more: Purer air onboard the bus may soon be a reality

Hjärne’s Elixir
Nils-Otto Ahnfelt, PhD pharmacist and visiting researcher at the Department of Pharmaceutical Biosciences, and Hjalmar Fors, a PhD and Docent in the history of science, have recreated the 300-year-old Hjärnes Testamente, a medicine invented by Swedish scientist Urban Hjärne and considered something of a universal elixir during the eighteenth century. The researchers’ modern taste reconstruction began as a side-project to a research project on reconstructing early-modern pharmaceuticals and culminated in the 2022 launch of Hjärnes Testamente, in the form of a bitter schnapps, by state-owned liquor store Systembolaget.

Learn more: Popular eighteenth-century elixir in new form

Mind Intelligence Lab
Mind Intelligence Lab develops technologies that make it possible to predict human behaviour – especially undesirable behaviour. This includes identifying the risk of violent behaviour and suicidal tendencies and detecting toxicity in online communication. Regardless of the area of application, one thing that all of these tools have in common is that they are based on analysing written digital communication and analysing the results to support assessment and decision-making. The technology – which combines machine learning, linguistic tags, behavioural psychology and statistics – reflects the broad palette of expertise assembled in the interdisciplinary research group behind the development: Nazar Akrami of the Department of Psychology and Lisa Kaati and Amendra Shrestha of the Department of Information Technology. UU Invest AB has invested in the company founded by the team to bring their tools to the market.

Learn more: The AI tool that can predict violence

Updates and stories

Last modified: 2023-07-21