© 2019 Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany
Through strong connections to the startup community, scientific centers of excellence, and external partners across industries, we spin in external ideas and opportunities to our business sectors and innovation projects. In addition, we foster internal ideation. Upon selection of their idea, our employees have the opportunity to move to the Innovation Center and focus on their Innovation Projects in order to ensure successful scale-up to a viable new business.
We are developing a novel security approach that can anchor physical objects in the digital world through a combination of artificial intelligence and blockchain.This effectively protects the integrity of supply chains and the genuineness of products, resulting in certainty for your business and your customers.
The benefits of this innovation project will include:
People aged 65 years have a fifty-fifty chance of being affected by a cataract – clouding of the natural eye lens. Vision can only be restored by cataract surgery where the clouded lens is removed and replaced by an artificial lens. However, currently available lenses often fail to provide accurate vision for the patient. LicriEye has developed an artificial, re-adjustable lens which promises patients the restoration of 100 % of their vision and has the potential to improve millions of lives.
The autoimmune disease Lupus nephritis (LN) causes the body’s immune system to attack the kidneys, which leads to flares of kidney inflammation. As of today, there is no effective tool to detect this inflammation in an easy way: Biopsies are highly invasive and therefore unsuitable for routine monitoring; and current biomarkers only quantify disease effects, but do not provide data on causal inflammation. The biomarker LGALS3BP might address this challenge. Initial research shows that the biomarker potentially provides data on causal inflammation with immediate results when tested in urine. Our novel research kit now enables scientists to test the potential of this new biomarker for kidney inflammation monitoring in urine samples for research purposes.