David Verde, head of innovation at IDIAPJGol: "We want to help researchers define the line between research and innovation"

David Verde is a very unusual geologist. After graduating, he was Research Manager at the UB, Project Manager at the Clínic Foundation, R&D Promoter at the Bosch i Gimpera Foundation and director of business development at Ymaging. He landed at IDIAPJGol five years ago and he has been responsible for innovation for two years now.

• You have a bit of a peculiar career path for being a geologist, don't you?

I did geology because it was a career I really liked. But hey, other opportunities came up and I had always really liked the field of biology and biochemistry, too. You get the "gusanillo", you like to manage projects, you learn how to make calls, you help create startups, spinoffs, transfer licenses or patent things and transfer them, either to the market or to other companies. Yes, it is true that I worked as a geologist for a month and a day, as if it were an administrative or criminal sentence. And the truth is that I was a little disappointed with how they did it and I left it.

• In your last project before IDIAP, at Ymaging, you were part of a team made up of engineers, scientists and specialists to create innovative solutions specific to companies. how was that

We set up the company based on a grant that we thought they could get from the Repsol Entrepreneurs' Fund, and the idea was to do things that were very much at the edge of research, providing solutions to companies and, ultimately, to society, in problems that had never been solved. At one point, the company got to grow a lot but things didn't quite work out. Planning is very easy, but sometimes, executing them is not so much.

• I understand that he sees developing very interesting projects. Do you remember any of them?

We used artificial intelligence, around 2010, using images, to discover diseases of the brain or heart or to find oil or gas in a field. We also used pictures to find out the weight of a pig or had to eat a huge amount of almonds to get a well-known brand of nuts not to include any bitter ones in the bags they put up for sale. The problem was that the only way to check at that time if the machine we had designed was right was to eat them, and the bitters had a cyanide compound that, apart from the unpleasant taste, if I had eaten 7 or 8, I might have ended up on the ground.

• And 4 years ago you took a turn and landed at the IDIAPJol. How did it all go?

I knew the previous director, Conxa Violant, and she told me that there was a replacement due to maternity. And it's also true that I was very interested in Primary Care because it was something I had never touched before, and I have relatives who work there, who are looking after people and I really enjoyed working there.

• Although you had already gone through a position in the world of medicine at the Clínic Foundation, how did you experience the change?

When I was at the UB Science Park I learned a lot about drug development from the point of view of diabetes in the first group, obesity and other types of diseases that are also minority. And when I was at the Clinic I was in a group that was very, very, very advanced at that time; we did things in maternal-fetal medicine, and in fact, the person who directed us was one of the three who operated on fetuses in the world at that time. Here, at IDIAPJGol, the best thing is that we study many diseases and are not focused on one, and that's why I learn things every day.

• You started as an international project manager, but you have been in charge of the Innovation Unit for 2 years. What do you think you are contributing to IDIAPJGol?

What we are contributing, not just me, but the whole team, is the idea of a vocation of service, of trying to help other researchers; it was difficult for them at first to understand where the line was, so to speak, between research and innovation. I think that this line is getting better and better drawn. We try to make them feel at ease, not to be afraid, because they have like a safety net that is us and that at a given moment they will no longer need. We have implanted this seed in a certain number of people so that everything they are doing - which they tend to carry out outside of their care work hours - does not remain as a piece of paper, written in a drawer, but is implement This is our obsession. And we also have a mantra: when you implement something in Primary Care, you implement it in the whole population: in us, in my mother, in my sister, in my neighbor... Everyone can enjoy this improvement .

• Speaking of innovations, which ones are you working on?

Some of our most advanced projects range from smoking cessation apps to designing a mobile phone holder to detect and diagnose a specific type of vertigo that affects many people, which is usually not treated in the best way and which ends up recurring in many patients. For example, Pau Gasol suffered from it and was unable to play for months, and also Maialen Chourraut, a white water paddleboarder, or swimmer Mireia Belmonte, who was unable to swim for almost six months because she had this vertigo. Aside from that, we're also working with a person who developed a game to try to minimize the effects of Alzheimer or dementia following a personal problem suffered by his father. We are giving shape to the project so that all consultations and residences can have this game.

• This week the new Health/AI Program was presented, a strategic commitment to ensure the ethics, fairness, efficiency and coordinated sustainability of artificial intelligence solutions in health in Catalonia. I imagine that at IDAPJGol you have been using it for some time, haven't you?

 Yes, there are projects related to this issue because we are an attractive partner due to the fact that we manage the SIDIAP, although legislatively it has some limitations that do not allow it to be used in the way that many private entities would like. Now we're starting to do small-scale internal testing and we're starting to have good alliances with centers that have good AI teams. In fact, we will send a European project related to a non-communicable disease, with which we believe we could advance the diagnosis between 6 and 12 months.

• As you already told us, applying AI to SIDIAP could give impressive results...

Precisely, another thing we want to do is work with synthetic databases, because we would avoid many of the limitations we have using real patient databases. The great advantage is that we have the SIDIAP to be able to create them; we have the technology, but the real quality of this data has yet to be verified.