The NRW Minister of Economic Affairs Andreas Pinkwart presented the NRW Innovation Award in the category of young talent to Dr Valentine Gesché from Institut für Textiltechnik of RWTH Aachen University, short ITA. Ms Gesché receives the prize, endowed with 50,000 euros, for the development and research of patient-individualised implants.

As head of the Exist research transfer project “PerAGraft”, Ms Gesché and her team are now working to bring this platform technology to market. Patients with a complex aortic aneurysm suffer from an increasing, pathological and permanent aneurysm of the aorta and shall be saved from the life-threatening rupture of the aorta by an individual implant. The innovative procedure reduces the delivery time of a customised implant from up to eight weeks today to less than a week.

“As life expectancy increases, so does the need for such implants for endovascular aortic repair,” explains Valentine Gesché.

“Ms Gesché is an outstanding young scientist and has the entrepre-neurial spirit to put her research results into practice for the benefit of people. Beyond that her work on the individualised medicine shows that the digitisation of engaged entrepreneurs can open health-economical and business perspectives for the benefit of patients,” says Economics and Innovation Minister Professor Dr Andreas Pinkwart over the engineer.

The NRW Innovation Award is one of the best endowed awards of its kind in Germany. In addition to Valentine Gesché in the “Young Talent” category, the innovation prize worth 100,000 euros was awarded to Professor Brunhilde Wirth, Director of the Institute for Human Genetics in Cologne, and the honorary prize went to Professor Helga Rübsamen-Schaeff, AiCuris GmbH & Co. KG.