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Jhpiego Receives Multi-year Award for Medical Innovation

Filed Under: Research, Biomedical Engineering, Bioengineering Research


Jhpiego Receives $24.9 million Award for Medical Innovation Jhpiego, a global health non-profit working to prevent the needless death of women and families, has unveiled plans for a multi-year effort to expand its array of simple, inexpensive life-saving solutions to today's global health challenges. The cooperative venture will leverage the engineering and medical expertise of The Johns Hopkins University (JHU).

In an October press release, the non-profit detailed the 5-year project, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), to develop innovative healthcare solutions with Hopkins Engineering's Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design (CBID), the Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health and Population Services International. CBID is a center within the nationally acclaimed JHU Biomedical Engineering Department. The first year commitment totals $3 million.

The program will aim at identifying promising health care technologies and strategies, introducing them to the field and implementing them nationally and globally. For the CBID program, this newest effort builds on a $1.4 million May partnership, called the "Day of Birth Alliance," with Jhpiego and Laerdal Global Health, to develop medical innovation to protect the health of pregnant women and newborns.

"While new health technologies have transformed medicine and expanded the quality of life in wealthier nations, there remains a dearth of new, low-cost and high impact technologies in the world's most impoverished places. This project will reduce that gap," says Dr. Harshad Sanghvi, Jhpiego's Medical Director and Vice President of Innovation.

Hopkins Engineering's CBID students, in a one-year master's level program, for two summers have traveled to countries including Ethiopia, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Nepal to assess critical healthcare needs. They spend an academic year developing promising medical innovations.

"As engineers we are looking at these very large clinical and public health needs with a fresh perspective," says Youseph Yazdi, executive director of CBID. "We are developing the innovative technologies here at Hopkins to solve these problems in simple, elegant ways. The result will be transformational medical innovations to solve some of the world's biggest healthcare challenges."

The new venture, called Accelovate, will be based in Jhpiego's Baltimore home office. It will identify and increase the use of innovative but simple technologies from the laboratories to the villages of world's most vulnerable people.

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