Roderic I. Pettigrew, PhD, M.D, Director for the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) www.nibib.nih.gov part of NIH, appeared before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee www.help.senate.gov on April 28th to discuss the future of medical innovations for patients.
In his career, Dr. Pettigrew established the Quantum Grants at NIBIB supporting high-risk reward projects to address major healthcare problems, such as microchips to capture circulating tumor cells for early detection and to monitor treatment
He explained how NIBIB is working to advance precision medicine to detect cancer cells at the point-of-care. Many therapies today work well for some people, but not for others. Matching a treatment to the unique features of an individual’s disease is the goal of the President’s Precision Medicine Initiative to enable customized treatments.
Also, the use of mobile technology has the potential to greatly help researchers better understand environmental and behavioral factors that cause disease with the goal of preventing or intervening in the process.
The overall potential application for information obtained using mobile technology is to link genomics and EHR data with a broad range of medical exposure and lifestyle information. By linking information, the use of “big data” can be precisely evaluated to identify new ways to improve human health.
In another area, NIBIB supports research that is leading to the next generation of neuroscience discovery tools and technologies. For example, researchers are developing a completely new noninvasive method to use for portable 3D human brain visualization called Magnetic Particle Imaging. This project will be able to provide higher imaging clarity and a completely new way to characterize and understand changes in brain circuit function that occurs in mental and neurological diseases.
At NIBIB, the telehealth program www.nibib.nih.gov/research/scientific-program-areas/telehealth is incorporating telemetry and remote access when analyzing and monitoring biomedical data. The telehealth program supports the development and hardware for telehealth studies with broad applications as well as early stage development of telehealth technology with specific focus areas.