R&D Team: Innovations that empower patient care
26/09/2025Pedro Alves, PhD, R&D Specialist
I’m 30 years old, 2 meters tall, and when I’m not working you’ll often find me on a tennis court or, sometimes, writing. Curiosity has always driven me, which led me to pursue an MSc in Bioengineering.
I then completed a PhD focused on fighting infections in chronic skin wounds. That experience taught me how to dive deeply into a single field while continuously learning across disciplines. More importantly, it strengthened my resilience. Along the way, I also had opportunities to interact with very talented researchers, attend and present at conferences, and receive training in Intellectual Property.
Today, I’m an R&D Specialist at Promptly, where I help the team in aligning the company’s product roadmap with national and European funding opportunities, translating strategic priorities into competitive grant proposals.
Promptly’s R&D team - Committed to imagining and shaping the healthcare of the future
Every company grows at its own pace, but in a fast-scaling organisation like ours, R&D is one of the engines driving progress. Funding calls play a special role here: imagining and shaping the healthcare of the future. When we align these calls with our product roadmap, we are essentially asking: which real, pressing needs have been identified by public and private funders, and how can our solutions address them?
This process, from ideation to proposal submission, generates value well beyond the grant itself. Internally, knowledge is consolidated and expanded. In consortium projects, we build synergies with leading institutions, often creating intangible benefits that strengthen our ecosystem.
It’s fulfilling when our employees start using the final product with their healthcare provider
A concrete example is the Collect product. In 2023, we submitted projects aimed at enhancing patient score comparisons. By 2024, our R&D manager, who had been involved in the proposals, began receiving PROMs for pregnancy follow-up on her own phone. At first, she thought she had been selected as a tester by the Engineering team. Only later did she realize this was the final product, already embedded in patient care. That journey from “R&D proposal” to “product optimization” to “direct benefit for patients” captures the real excitement of our work. This is the most exciting part of our work. We are not only at the forefront of EU innovation projects, policy briefs, and the latest advances in health analytics. We also see how the ideas we put into project proposals quickly translate into tangible impact for patients.
R&D projects allow our Data Partners to gain early access to cutting-edge AI
For our Data Partners, participating in R&D projects with Promptly enables them to unlock more value from their assets than day-to-day operations allow. Through competitive European initiatives, partners gain early access to cutting-edge AI and data analytics pipelines, co-develop new use cases, and create opportunities for their IT teams to tackle ambitious challenges beyond their routine scope. This accelerates learning, builds collaboration with leading European institutions, and ensures that the full potential of their health data is realized.
We are preparing to take on larger and more competitive European calls.
Looking ahead, the role of the R&D team will be to continue serving as a lever for advancing the company’s knowledge and capabilities. Projects will remain a relatively safe but ambitious testbed for exploring new product features. At the same time, we are preparing to take on larger and more competitive European calls. These opportunities will allow us to expand our collaborations with top-tier institutions, stretch our knowhow, and deliver even more impactful innovations. All in service of our mission to empower better, patient-centered healthcare.
We’re already shaping new consortiums for the upcoming European calls, and what excites us most is the collaborative spirit behind them. When partners bring their expertise and curiosity to the table, the projects grow into something larger than the sum of their parts. If you see your teams contributing to this shared effort, we’d love to explore opportunities to work together.
