Boston Biomedical Innovation Center (B-BIC) Spurs Biomedical Innovation by Awarding Grants that Accelerate Commercialization
Boston, MA (PRWEB) August 27, 2014 -- The Boston Biomedical Innovation Center (B-BIC), a healthcare consortium designed to accelerate commercialization of early stage biomedical innovations, today announced it has awarded its first two DRIVE grants, which support innovations having potential to significantly improve healthcare and reduce costs.
“B-BIC is a National Center for Accelerated Innovation that has been specifically selected by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to help close the gap between invention and commercialization,” said Joseph Loscalzo, M.D., Ph.D., Harvard Medical School Hersey Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine, Chair of the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Program Director of B-BIC. “We intend to make significant contributions that will improve patient care. Each DRIVE award recipient will receive funding, project management support, individualized skills development, and active commercialization-focused mentoring from a team of entrepreneurial experts.”
These first DRIVE grants have been awarded to two leading clinical innovators within Partners HealthCare. Seemantini Nadkarni, Ph.D., Harvard Medical School Assistant Professor at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, received a DRIVE grant to continue development of a low-cost, bed-side blood sensor that addresses the critical unmet need to rapidly identify patients with an elevated risk of life-threatening bleeding or thrombosis, the major cause of in-hospital preventable death. The device could enable rapid testing in a doctor’s office or at home, a development that could benefit over 15 million people worldwide who receive anticoagulants to prevent thrombosis.
Jonathan Thon, Ph.D., Harvard Medical School Instructor in Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Joseph Italiano, Ph.D., Harvard Medical School Associate Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, received a DRIVE grant to continue development of a system that would produce platelets in vitro to address the significant unmet demand for these life-saving cells. Platelets are responsible for clot formation and blood vessel repair, and platelet transfusions dramatically increases survival rates following cancer treatment and surgery. However, current demand for platelets exceeds supply, which leaves many people vulnerable during their recovery.
About B-BIC
The Boston Biomedical Innovation Center (B-BIC) is a consortium of academic medical centers, government, non-profit organizations, industry, and venture capital designed to accelerate translation of early stage biomedical innovations into commercially viable products. As an NIH National Center for Accelerated Innovation (NCAI) supported by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), B-BIC provides grants, mentoring, and skills development to academic investigators for development of devices, diagnostics, and therapeutics addressing heart, lung, blood, and sleep disorders. In addition to NHLBI, B-BIC is supported by the two founding institutions of Partners HealthCare, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, as well as Harvard Medical School. The Center includes those institutions as well as Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston Medical Center, Boston University, Draper Laboratory, Northeastern University, and the Veterans Administration Boston Healthcare System. For more information, visit http://www.b-bic.org.
For media inquiries, contact Marc Filerman: 617-643-3831, mfilerman(at)partners(dot)org
Marc Filerman, CIMIT, http://www.cimit.org, +1 617-643-3831, [email protected]
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