NE Trends

Boston University (BU; Boston) has launched a new awards program that encourages collaboration between medical engineers and clinicians. A $150,000 has been provided by from the Johnson & Johnson Corporate Office of Science and Technology (COSAT) to help such partnerships develop new medical technologies that solve unmet clinical needs. The grant enables student teams from different backgrounds and from up to 17 schools and colleges at BU to work on solutions to technology challenges faced by clinicians.

The university's Institute for Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization (ITEC) announced the BU Clinical Innovation Awards Program (CIAP) in August. The CIAP is part of BU's initiative to promote campus collaboration and the commercialization of medical products that enhance patient care.
“The purpose of this program is slightly different from other grants that are designed to work with people who have novel solutions or inventions,” says Jonathan Rosen, PhD, executive director of ITEC. “What we wanted to do was [get involved] even earlier in the process and talk directly with physicians about what problems they felt needed to [be] solved.”
Based on the ideas and suggestions of clinicians, ITEC can use the grant to assemble teams of student and faculty to work on solutions to specific problems. “The output of that effort will be the beginning of a traditional translational process where those solutions will compete for grant money within the university and outside and eventually result in commercialized products,” says Rosen. “This really is helping identify new problems to work on and getting more of the clinical community involved in the process of improving care for the patient.”
Rosen expects to be able to fund 5–10 research teams during the first year of the pilot program. He hopes that this number increases, along with the grant support. The CIAP will also facilitate collaboration between BU and local medical device companies.
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