On 17–18 June 2026, Clust-ER Health took part 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.
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 support for 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 allowed local ecosystems to 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. The presentation covered 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. It also touched on Emilia-Romagna’s broader international cooperation activity, of which the mission to Cluj-Napoca is itself a part.
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 Clust-ER Health priorities, such as personalised medicine, drug delivery and biocompatibility testing, new-materials evaluation, and 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 highlighted during 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 approaches the link between food and health in its 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.
