The Atlantic Pediatric Device Consortium (APDC) http://atlanticpediatricdeviceconsortium.org was one of seven FDA www.fda.gov funded pediatric device consortia awarded in 2013. Through a collaboration between Georgia Tech, Emory University, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and Virginia Commonwealth University, APDC enables ideas to be translated from product development all the way to commercialization.
APDC brings together expertise that exists in pediatric care, engineering, and business to foster ideas and creativity. The principle goal is to connect existing clinical and engineering resources to focus on device development related to underserved needs in the diagnosis and treatment of pediatric patients.
Anemia affects over one billion people yearly worldwide and most commonly caused by nutritional deficiencies in iron, folate, or vitamin B12. Young infants are at particular risk for anemia which if untreated, can lead to permanent neurologic and cognitive damage.
Due to lack of medical resources in developing countries to diagnose anemia, thousands of children and adults die needlessly every day due to severe undiagnosed anemia. Although some point-of-care anemia diagnostics exist, up until now, there was no inexpensive, disposable, self-contained, patient-operated, and self-test available for diagnosing and assessing the degree of anemia in both adults and children in resource poor settings.
Today, a device called AnemoCheck developed by Principal Investigators, Erika Tyburski, and Wilbur Lam MD, PhD, is a simple, disposable, handheld biochemical device that can evaluate anemia in less than two minutes.
The AnemoCheck device along with other projects were recently chosen to receive seed funding for $1.6 million from the Coulter Translational Research Partnership http://whcf.org/coulter-foundation-programs/translational-research program from a group of research projects being developed at the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory www.bme.gatech.edu. The plan is to demonstrate that there is a pipeline of translational projects that have the potential for commercialization at Georgia Tech and Emory.
Projects were selected for funding with the help of professional healthcare consultants in marketing, regulatory, reimbursement, and intellectual property to determine the likelihood of receiving commercial follow-on funding for these healthcare innovations.