LASER 2011 Concluded with All Time High

The world’s largest trade fair devoted to laser and photonics technology ended on Thursday, 26 May, in Munich, Germany, hitting an all-time high. Attendance for LASER World of Photonics 2011 grew 8% over last year, with show organizers announcing 27,500 visitors and more than 1100 exhibitors, also a record. Medical technology, biophotonics, renewable energies and electro-mobility were named as the major growth areas for the laser industry.

The trade fair is accompanied by the World of Photonics Congress, a convention that attracted 3250 participants from all corners of the world. The congress includes seven sub-conferences, one of which— the European Conference on Biomedical Optics ECBO—has become the largest event of its kind in Europe. Topics such as advanced microscopy techniques, optical coherence tomography and therapeutic laser applications were addressed at the ECBO this year, attracting clinicians and industry developers as well as people from the research community.

20th Anniversary of OCT

A joint session of ECBO and CLEO Europe celebrated the 20th anniversary of optical coherence tomography (OCT) with a technology and applications tutorial by OCT pioneer James G. Fujimoto . The actual ECBO plenary on the OCT history was presented by Wolfgang Drexler of the Medical University of Vienna (Austria) under the headline “Twenty years of optical coherence tomography: where is it heading?”

Billions for Photonics

The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) unveiled its promotional package “Photonics Research Germany” on the trade fair’s opening day. Optical technologies are held to be one of the most important key technologies of the future. The announcement by Dr. Georg Schütte, Secretary of State at the BMBF, of a total of one billion euros over the next ten years to promote research and development in the photonics sector was warmly received by the public, as the trade show organizer touted. Germany’s famous FAZ had a slightly different view on the event: According to FAZ, the community expected some € 150 Million annually. It has to be seen in contrast to the funding programs for nano technology (€ 400 million until 2015) or e-mobility (€ 1.000 million until 2013!). Nevertheless, the industry partners in the field of photonics promised some € 30 billion investments in R&D for the next 10 years, assuming to spend 10% of their expected revenues of € 300 billion.

Ultrafast Lasers on the Rise

After decades of development, ultrafast lasers finally arrived in the manufacturing industry. This is at least one important news from this years LASER World of Photonics. Ultrafast lasers generate femto or pico second light pulses and were popular in science for the research on nature’s ultrafast phenomena such as photosynthesis. But severe technical improvements were necessary to qualify the systems for use in material processing. First they were applied to eye surgery, but now with more than 1 kW average power available from one source, they are ready for industry applications such as micro processing or surface modification.

LASER World of Photonics takes place every other year in Munich; it returns to the Messe München in 2013 from 17 to 20 June.

When medical doctors become startup founders

The Charité Entrepreneurship Summit is an international workshop for start-up creation and entrepreneurship related to biomedical innovation. It was the place to be for newbies as well as for serial founders.

It was quite an exclusive crowd which met at this year’s Charité Entrepreneurship Summit: Venture capitalists, start-up founder, entrepreneurs, medical doctors and many people from biomedical research came to Berlin on April 11 and 12. Most requested for their experience was a very special species: the serial founder.

Finally, about 300 people from Germany, America and many other places came here to discuss ways to turn research ideas into successful companies. The Charité is Europe’s biggest hospital and hence, the discussions circled around biomedical innovations and pharmaceutical research. Although the exclusive location (a few steps from Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag) suggested a German bias, the discussion and presentations were fully international, with a strong American influence.

The setting of the two day summit supported the direct exchange of knowledge: Half the time people gathered for keynotes, the other half they met in small work groups with expert panels to discuss their urgent topics such as access to venture capital or regulatory hurdles and how to overcome them. In a third track were some special events such as “Business speed dating”, a “Venture Lounge” or Charité-related issues.

The ten keynote speakers were outstanding, the list started with the Qiagen CEO Peer Schatz and ended with Peter Thiel, the Co-founder and former CEO of PayPal. Most of them had a real story to tell, namely Peer Schatz. He believes that personalized health care is the most important change in health care in the last decades. And within that change, Qiagen focuses on the mega trend of Molecular Information. Using the opportunities of today’s gene sequencing, he sees ways to correlate genotypes and phenotypes. And that might be a start of an “information age of health science”. He prolonged this analogy to another point: Gene sequencing is getting cheaper in a pace that is faster than Moore's law, reaching $ 10k now and going down to $ 1k for one set of genes. That will enable a new era of diagnostics.

But what kind of industry are biomedical diagnostics? Today it is a $ 25 billion industry, whereas pharmaceuticals make $ 600 billion per year. But while the pharma industry grows by 4% CAGR, diagnostics show 14% growth. So biomedical diagnostics technology (and lots of it will be biophotonics!) will be a very hot topic in coming years.

But the main topic of the summit was entrepreneurship. And there was a lot of valuable knowledge for the starters and founders at the summit. One issue was certainly the development of incubators, where science is transferred to business in a sustainable and professional way. Another extremely fascinating presentation dealt with the topic “How to negotiate a term sheet with a venture capitalist”. There, an insider gave a full list of Do’s and Dont’s for this crucial part of a start-up foundation.

Finally, there was this atmosphere: Certainly, founding and financing new business is a business and a community on its own. People know each other for ages and celebrate the usual meet and greet of an international summit. But among them, there were many young founders and many of those serial founders. And they gave the event the special atmosphere. Because all of the serial founders agreed on one point: If someone starts a business, he needs to be enthusiastic, he needs to burns for his product. And this enthusiasm blended with the optimism of those who showed that such dreams can be realized gave the summit a very special spirit.

http://www.charite-summit.de/2011/