Development of a non-invasive medical device to measure the skin biomechanical properties: assessment of the commercial feasibility

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Skin pathologies including wounds, scars and tumors represent important public health issues. (e.g. melanoma is the first cancer in terms of increasing frequency). Moreover, skin firmness is an essential property aimed by cosmetic products. However, skin assessment methods remain based on empirical considerations and it is still difficult to determine the skin biomechanical properties, which prevents developing a personalized medicine approach. Such medical device is needed by the physicians to adapt the therapeutic strategy and by the cosmetic manufacturers to develop and validate their product, and to propose the optimal product in a customer-specific manner. AssesSkin is based on results obtained in the ERC CoG project BoneImplant and aims at developing and validating a medical device consisting in a decision support-system allowing to assess the skin biomechanical properties. The objectives of AssesSkin are i) to achieve a minimum viable product that will be validated in vitro and in vivo, and ii) to investigate its commercial potential and design an exploitation strategy via spin-off creation or licensing. We will explore the possibility to license the technology to ImpacTell, an already existing spin-off of the same laboratory. The originality is to use an impact-based measurement method, which allows to obtain a non-invasive, cheap and easy to use medical device. Regulatory issues will be at the heart of the development and we will work in order to clear the regulatory pathway of the future medical device. The team is constituted by members with complementary skills (engineers, a business developer, a dermatologist and a plastic surgeon). AssesSkin will allow the promotion of innovative solution and services in dermatology, plastic surgery and in the cosmetic industry. The long-term vision is for the technology to become a reference in these fields. Strong impacts are associated to AssesSkin, in particular for patients, physicians and cosmetic manufacturers.