More than 250 scientists, clinicians, and engineers attended a conference co-hosted by NIH www.nih.gov and IEEE www.ieee.org that focused on current developments and future research challenges related to Point-of-Care (POC) technologies whether attempted at the beside, in a remote village, or on a battlefield.
“The conference was held to map out a research plan for the future by bringing stakeholders from various backgrounds in healthcare, government, academia, small business, large businesses, and nonprofits together”, reported Dr. Tiffani Lash, Program Director for Sensors and Telehealth at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering www.nibib.nih.gov.
As pointed out, a major effort in monitoring cancers, involves assessing early stage technologies in terms of clinical needs, market demands, and the need to set commercialization strategies.
The “Center for Future Technologies in Cancer Care” (CFTCC) www.bu.edu/cftcc at Boston University is identifying prototyping and doing early clinical assessments on innovative POC technologies for the treatment, screening, diagnosis, and monitoring of cancers.
The CFTCC is working with an integrated multidisciplinary team consisting of engineers, clinicians, public health practitioners, and technology transfer experts to evaluate technologies in various stages of development across a range of primary care and non-traditional healthcare settings.
Dr. Atam Dhawan, Vice Provost for Research for the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Conference Co-Chair explained, “This was very much a working conference and at the end of the conference, a task force was formed to develop a white paper on future strategic directions for point-of-care technologies.”
Dr. Jim Gallarda, Senior Program Officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation summed up ideas at the Conference by saying, “All of us from diagnostics innovators to healthcare professionals in both developed and developing countries need to work together to respond with effective POC solutions capable of addressing global healthcare needs.”