Pedro Pedrosa joins InnoStars to strengthen connections across Portugal’s health innovation community

InnoStars has welcomed Pedro Pedrosa as its new Ecosystem Lead for Portugal, strengthening its local presence and connections with Portugal’s health and life sciences community.

Pedro brings experience in biotechnology, technology transfer and turning research into real-world applications. In his new role, he will work with researchers, start-ups, healthcare organisations, industry and public partners across Portugal, while helping connect them with the wider InnoStars network and opportunities across Europe.

It is a role that fits closely with both Pedro’s experience and the work InnoStars wants to do in Portugal: helping good ideas move from research towards the market, bringing the right organisations together and making it easier for innovation to find its way into practice.

From research to real-world use

Before joining InnoStars, Pedro led the Innovation Office at ITQB NOVA, where he worked with researchers on the protection and commercialisation of research results, industry partnerships, licensing and the creation of spin-offs.

That experience gave him a close view of a challenge familiar to many researchers and founders: strong science is only the beginning. Moving from a promising result in the lab to something that can be used by healthcare professionals and patients requires the right partners, funding, market knowledge and connections. As Pedro puts it:

“Our scientific and clinical talent in Portugal is world-class, but great science alone doesn’t guarantee market impact. My priority is to bridge that gap, giving innovators the tools, capital connections and ecosystem support they need to turn breakthrough ideas into scalable healthcare realities.”

This is also where his role connects naturally with InnoStars. The organisation works across Europe to help innovators move from research to market, connect organisations that can work together and support the adoption of new solutions. Having someone in Portugal who knows the local landscape, understands the research environment and can bring the right people together makes those connections much more practical.

A new role, and already a seat at the table

Pedro’s first months with InnoStars will also take him into one of Portugal’s most interesting conversations about the future of healthcare. He has been selected as one of 60 participants in the third edition of Health Parliament Portugal, from a total of 759 applicants nationwide.

Over six months, participants from different professional backgrounds will work together on some of the main challenges facing healthcare in Portugal. Their work is organised around six areas, including health innovation and value, health data and AI, access and integrated care, prevention and diagnosis, oncology and mental health. Pedro will be part of the Oncology working group, where the aim is practical: to develop recommendations that can be presented to policymakers and the Portuguese Parliament. Health Parliament Portugal is organised by Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine, Expresso and Microsoft.

For Pedro, taking part is closely connected to the work he will be doing at InnoStars. Questions around why promising technologies struggle to reach healthcare, what makes adoption difficult and how research, companies, clinicians and public institutions can work better together sit at the heart of both roles. His participation also gives Pedro another way to listen to what is happening across the Portuguese health sector and bring that knowledge back into his work with InnoStars and its partners. Rather than treating research, business and public policy as separate conversations, Pedro sees value in bringing them closer together. That is particularly relevant for InnoStars, whose work is built around helping innovators progress, opening routes to new markets and connecting people and organisations across Europe.

Connecting Portugal with the wider InnoStars network

For Portuguese researchers, start-ups, healthcare organisations and other partners, Pedro will be a local point of contact for InnoStars. He will help identify opportunities to work together, connect organisations with relevant partners in other countries and support collaborations that can help promising ideas move forward. For InnoStars, his appointment means being closer to what is happening in Portugal: the people developing new solutions, the institutions supporting them and the challenges they encounter when trying to bring innovation into healthcare.

And Pedro is already starting those conversations.

Connect with Pedro

If you work in health, life sciences, research or innovation in Portugal and see an opportunity to work together, you can connect with Pedro Pedrosa on LinkedIn or email pedro.pedrosa@innostars.org and start the conversation.

Prefer to meet in person? There will be an opportunity very soon.

Pedro will join InnoStars at the Innovating Health Together Conference 2026 in Lisbon on 27 – 28 October.

If you are attending IHT, come and meet Pedro and the InnoStars team. Tell us what you are working on, what you are looking for and where you think collaboration could help.

Sometimes the best partnerships start with a simple conversation.