Clust-ER Health at the Italy-Romania Cluster Mission

On 17–18 June 2026 Clust-ER Health, in an institutional mission to Cluj-Napoca, Romania, alongside the other Emilia-Romagna Clust-ERs and colleagues from ART-ER. Hosted by the North-West Regional Development Agency (ADR Nord-Vest Romania), the two-day programme brought together regional authorities, clusters, universities and research institutes from both regions, with the aim of building lasting connections between two innovation ecosystems.

Setting the scene: two ecosystems, two approaches

The mission opened in Cluj-Napoca with a series of institutional presentations that set a useful frame for everything that followed. Anna Sarcov, Head of Smart Specialisation for the North-West Region, walked participants through Romania’s S3 strategy: ten priority domains, including supporting the Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP) from the European Union, alongside six broader strategic sectors, one of which encompasses health.

Anca Roman, Head of the INNO and Investment Attraction Department at ADR Nord-Vest Romania, then presented the agency’s support tools for innovators and investors. Among these is the Level UP Health & Life Sciences Accelerator, the first programme in Romania dedicated specifically to health and life-sciences startups: launched in 2023 with EIT Health’s support and built around a network of regional partners, it is now in its third edition, with this year’s cohort of 11 startups pitching solutions spanning AI-assisted diagnostics, women’s health, neurotechnology, medical software, patient monitoring and personalised nutrition. Anca Roman also presented the region’s network of 17 Smart Specialisation Parks, rolled out since 2024 and backed by around €2M in funding for 2021–2027, and comparable to Emilia-Romagna’s Technopoles.

Ioana Dragoș, technical expert at ADR Nord-Vest Romania, then explained how the region’s 12 clusters came to be. Rather than defining priority domains top-down, the region let local ecosystems organise into clusters bottom-up, around the actors and interests already present on the ground. One outcome of this approach is that the resulting cluster map does not include a dedicated health cluster, a structural difference from Emilia-Romagna’s Clust-ER system.

Gianluca Baldoni, who leads the internationalisation of the regional production system at the Emilia-Romagna Region, and Valeria Bandini, who heads ART-ER’s Europe and Internationalisation office, closed the institutional session with a presentation of Emilia-Romagna’s innovation ecosystem. They walked the Romanian audience through the region’s research and innovation policies and infrastructures and outlined how the Clust-ERs operate as public-private associations bringing together companies, universities and research centres around the region’s S3 priority areas, including health. The presentation also touched on Emilia-Romagna’s broader international cooperation activity, of which this mission to Cluj-Napoca is itself a part.

Matchmaking: connecting across Cluj’s innovation ecosystem

The morning’s matchmaking sessions opened up to a wider set of conversations with organisations whose activities touch health from different angles, from life-sciences research to digital health to food and nutrition.
The first conversation was with Freshblood, represented by Ion Petrovai, Co-Founder and Director of Innovation. Freshblood is not a cluster but a Cluj-based non-profit association, active since 2017, supporting healthcare startups and SMEs across Romania and Eastern Europe through mentoring, coaching and connections with the wider ecosystem. Since 2018 it has also served as the Romanian hub of EIT Health’s Regional Innovation Scheme.

MedFUTURE, the translational research institute of the “Iuliu Hațieganu” University of Medicine and Pharmacy, was a natural interlocutor for the day. Represented by Director Cristina Iuga, the institute brings together a 15-strong multidisciplinary research team working across the full translational pipeline — from biomarker discovery and patient stratification through to drug repurposing and pre-clinical testing — with a strong focus on cancer and rare diseases. Its new premises, under construction next to the university hospital and the medicine and pharmacy faculty, will strengthen an already close relationship with real-world clinical data. MedFUTURE’s interests align closely with several of our own priorities: such as personalised medicine, drug delivery and biocompatibility testing, new-materials evaluation, or capacity building.

Transilvania IT Cluster, represented by its Manager of the European Projects Department Andrei Martiniuc, also proved a relevant conversation. Digitalisation and AI run across all five value chains of Clust-ER Health so a horizontal digital cluster of this scale brings real potential for collaboration. With around 190 members (88% SMEs) and a staff of roughly 30, running 15 active projects at any given time, the cluster coordinates a dedicated Digital Health working table and, as we learned the following day, counts over 100 member companies already active in healthcare.

AgroTransilvania Cluster, represented by General Manager Felix Arion, brought a different but genuinely relevant angle: health through nutrition. The cluster promotes local agri-food products explicitly tied to healthy living and lobbies at ministerial and European Parliament level on food policy. The conversation also touched on how Clust-ER Health itself approaches the link between food and health in its own project proposals as a basis for future alignment with AgroTransilvania’s own work on healthy, locally-sourced nutrition.

Rounding out the matchmaking, Oradea Local Development Agency (represented by Andrei Crăciun, Head of Development Unit) presented its work attracting investment to the region: over 120 companies across its technoparks, land-purchase grants and multi-year tax rebates. Finally, Cluj IT Cluster (represented by Ovidiu Codreanu, DIH4Society Service Coordinator) presented one of Romania’s longest-running IT cluster associations, founded in 2012 and bringing together over 100 members, including software companies, universities, research institutes and a number of hospitals, with activities ranging from internationalisation support to digital and green transformation projects.

Field visits, Day 1: precision engineering and medical robotics at UTCN

In the afternoon, Clust-ER Health headed to the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca (UTCN) for a series of laboratory visits. At the 3D Scanning and Measuring Laboratory, Assistant Professor Ștefan Bodi showed equipment representing over €1M of investment in high-precision measurement. A technology that, beyond its applications in fields like automotive and cultural heritage, can also be used for the accurate scanning of bone structures ahead of joint replacement surgery as well as for fitting complete dental prosthetics.

At the Medical Robotics Laboratory, part of UTCN’s CESTER – Research Centre for Industrial Robots Simulation and Testing, Assistant Professor Paul Tucan presented the centre’s work on robots for medical applications. Over the years, CESTER’s teams have developed robotic systems for minimally invasive surgery including laparoscopic and pancreatic procedures, as well as post-stroke rehabilitation robots, several of which have already been used in clinical trials at Cluj-Napoca hospitals, treating patients with neuromuscular, vascular and other motor impairments.

The visit continued with a look at some of UTCN’s other facilities: a hydrogen fuel cell laboratory, 3D printing and virtual reality demonstrations, and the workshops of two student engineering teams of particular note: ART TU Cluj-Napoca, which designs and builds a fully electric Formula Student race car with the backing of Porsche Engineering Romania, and Solis-EV, the university’s solar-powered vehicle team. Porsche Engineering Romania is also the founding partner of UTCN’s “Advanced Techniques in Automotive Engineering” Master’s programme, which combines coursework with hands-on research and internships for students pursuing careers in automotive R&D.

Day 2: AI, translational research and digital health

Day two opened at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (AIRi), part of the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca and due to open officially in September 2026 with capacity for over 300 researchers, including labs dedicated to industrial collaborations with Vodafone, Orange and Bosch. Levente Tamas, researcher in Robotics & AI and also an entrepreneur in his own right, presented work on robotics and non-linear control with applications extending to health rehabilitation. Adrian Groza, Prorector for IT & Digitalisation at the University and incoming director of AIRi, presented the institute’s seven research tracks, one of which — AI in Healthcare — is entirely dedicated to the sector: from explainable diagnostic models and AI-based analysis of brain activity to AI in medical imaging, and a set of robotics lines covering surgery robots and robots for the rehabilitation of neuromotor deficits — a direct continuation of the work we had seen the day before at CESTER. Beyond this dedicated track, the conversation also touched on an ongoing drone project with Hungarian partners that uses 5G connectivity between hospitals in Cluj for emergency logistics, a topic that resonated directly with the regional DroneCare project on medical deliveries to remote or emergency settings.

The morning continued at MedFUTURE, where Director Cristina Iuga gave an interesting presentation of the institute’s laboratories, equipment and research lines, alongside several of her colleagues present in the room. Around 80% of MedFUTURE’s research activity is oncology-focused, and the institute leads Romania’s network of oncology hospitals. Given the limited time available, delegates split into three smaller groups, each visiting one of the institute’s laboratories (CAR-T cell engineering, the animal facility, or the Proteomics and Metabolomics laboratory), a hands-on look at a genuinely unique infrastructure for personalised medicine in Romania, covering everything from mass-spectrometry-based multi-omics to newborn screening for rare metabolic diseases and hemophilia diagnostics.

The afternoon turned to the digital sector. At Transilvania IT Cluster, the visit opened with a presentation of the cluster itself: founded in 2013, today one of the largest IT clusters in Romania and South-Eastern Europe with around 200 active members, a “Gold” European cluster management label, and a track record that includes co-organising Romanian Digital Day at the European Parliament. Four member companies then pitched solutions with clear relevance for healthcare:

• Evozon, with a real-time tracking and localisation system for hospitals (patients, equipment, medicines and staff) with potential applications for hospital operations and facility management;
• IoT4Nature, with an air-quality monitoring system that certifies facilities such as schools and hospitals after a month of good air-quality readings;
• Nirvsystem, with a Canadian-developed system to help healthcare facilities stay compliant through every phase of staff onboarding; and
• NTT Data, whose extensive track record in EU project proposals didn’t focus on healthcare directly but touched on themes (such as federated data spaces) with clear potential for alignment.

The mission’s IT-focused day closed at Cluj IT Cluster, as part of the IT Managers Club, with a presentation of the regional cluster system and the individual Clust-ERs to local IT companies and stakeholders, in which Clémence Foltz presented Clust-ER Health and Emilia-Romagna’s regional innovation ecosystem model alongside the other Emilia-Romagna Clust-ERs, followed by a networking aperitivo that brought the two delegations together one last time before departure.

Looking ahead

Two days and a dense agenda gave us a clear sense of where Emilia-Romagna and North-West Romania’s health-related innovation ecosystems already overlap, such as translational research, digital health, AI applications in care, and food-as-health. A warm thank you to ADR Nord-Vest Romania for the welcome and organisation, to ART-ER for coordinating the Emilia-Romagna delegation, and to all the institutions, clusters and researchers who shared their time and their work with us. We look forward to following up on the connections made in Cluj-Napoca.