NIH Launches $1M Competition Targeting Global Health Via Hand-held Diagnostics

To spur the development of noninvasive, hand-held, digital technologies to detect, diagnose, and guide therapies for diseases with high global and public health impact, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has launched a Technology Accelerator Challenge that will award $1 million in prizes. The challenge is focused on sickle cell disease, malaria, and anemia and is led by NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB).

The NIH challenge is designed to stimulate the development of a platform technology that could be used to rapidly screen large populations as well as provide physicians with a practical tool for optimizing therapy in individual patients.

“While this challenge is not constrained to any specific technology, the inspiration for it comes from the widespread availability of mobile phones and the potential for mobile phone-linked sensor technologies to noninvasively detect changes in the blood and blood vessels associated with these treatable diseases,” NIBIB Director Bruce Tromberg said. For low-resource settings, diagnostics would ideally be portable, self-contained, low-cost, adaptable to multiple diseases, and able to integrate information about the patient and the environment in interpreting the test result.

The challenge will accept applications through June 2, 2020. Researchers and others can register and submit an application through the challenge website: https://www.nibib.nih.gov/NIH-Technology-Accelerator-Challenge.