Better medtech decisions begin when we connect 3 things that are too often examined separately ...
...clinical need, scientific evidence and the technology landscape.
That is the approach we have been developing at FRESCI within the EIC Transition Coati-X project.
For patients undergoing haemodialysis or long-term cancer treatment, central vascular access devices can be essential to care. At the same time, infection and thrombosis remain important complications, with consequences for patients, treatment continuity and healthcare systems.
Our 2025 white paper, Safer Devices for Kidney Disease and Cancer Patients, started from this clinical perspective.
But understanding why innovation is needed is only the beginning.
The next question is:
What does the scientific evidence tell us about how these complications might be addressed?
Our recen pre-print Open Research Europe review, Central vascular access in kidney and cancer care: devices, biomaterial strategies, and prevention of complications, examines how device materials, surface properties and design can influence thrombogenicity, infection risk and overall device performance.
The scientific landscape is active.
Antimicrobial coatings, antithrombogenic surfaces, advanced polymers and multifunctional approaches are all being investigated.
At the same time, the evidence points to an important translational challenge: durability, standardisation, long-term clinical validation and multifunctional integration remain critical issues when moving from promising science towards clinically viable technologies.
And this creates another layer of questions for innovation teams:
What already exists? Who is developing it? How mature are these technologies? Where is the evidence strongest? And what should genuinely be considered competition?
This is why we developed the Coati-X Medical Device Coating Intelligence Dashboard.
The current dashboard structures 528 evidence records across 88 organisations and 14 medical-device segments, allowing the landscape to be interrogated by dimensions including commercial maturity, device application, chemistry, function, regulatory stage, evidence quality, technical disclosure and strategic threat.
But one principle is particularly important.
Scientific visibility, commercial maturity, evidence quality and competitive threat are different signals.
A technology can be prominent in the scientific literature without being close to market.
A commercially established solution may address only one part of the clinical problem.
And a technology that initially appears highly competitive may look very different once its evidence base, regulatory positioning, chemistry disclosure or application breadth are examined.
For this reason, the dashboard deliberately separates portfolio presence from evidence quality and competitive threat, rather than interpreting database frequency as market share. The dataset-derived indicators are analytical proxies—not estimates of revenue, company valuation or market share. Coati-X
This is what the work represents for us at FRESCI.
Not a white paper, a scientific review and a market database developed as separate outputs.
But one connected evidence pathway: Clinical need → Scientific evidence → Technology landscape → Competitive intelligence → Strategy
The dashboard supports that pathway through three complementary views:
Technology Landscape — to examine chemistry families, application breadth, commercial traction and potential white space.
Competitive Panorama — to distinguish portfolio breadth, evidence strength, disclosure and competitive pressure.
Market Explorer — to perform rapid diligence across companies, products, chemistry, active agents, geography and differentiating claims.
For deep-tech and medtech innovation, this distinction matters.
Knowing that a technology is scientifically interesting is not enough.
Teams also need to understand why it matters clinically, what evidence supports it, what alternatives already exist, where translation is still constrained and where meaningful differentiation can still be created.
That is where Science & Strategy meet.
And it is the role we are playing within Coati-X: connecting fragmented scientific, technological and competitive evidence so that innovation decisions can be made with a clearer view of both opportunity and risk.
Explore the Coati-X Medical Device Coating Intelligence Dashboard: Open the interactive dashboard
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