Harvard’s Wyss Institute, Brigham and Women’s Hospital launch Diagnostic Accelerator

The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and Boston’s Brigham and Women Hospital announced the launch of a Diagnostic Accelerator that aims to create new diagnostic technologies.

The goal is to compress the time frame for introducing diagnostic technologies specifically developed to solve high-value clinical problems.

The Brigham clinical community will identify these unmet needs, which will then be matched to technologies created by the engineering community at Wyss. The resulting diagnostic assays will be jointly validated and optimized in clinical settings.

Dr. David Walt, professor of Pathology-Brigham and Women’s Hospital, told MobiHealthNews that, because the accelerator has just started, they don’t have any specific projects, but expect to choose several projects in the next few months.

“These include novel tests that can be done in the hospital to inform patient care, tests that can be run at mobile health units or pharmacies, and also at-home tests that will help physicians manage recently discharged patients to ensure they are recovering properly,” he said.

Dr. Walt, who is also part of the core faculty at the Wyss Institute and Hansjörg Wyss professor of biologically inspired engineering at Harvard Medical School, said the central premise is to start with the clinical unmet need.

“Technology developers often develop new tools and cool tech without having any idea of where the technology can make an impact,” he explained. “Consequently, even after a technology has been developed, finding the right application can take years.”

Dr. Walt said by starting with the clinical need – that is, the market pull – they can help technology developers focus their efforts on the right problem, thereby compressing the time frame for getting the right technological solutions to patients.

The accelerator will use an online portal to solicit proposals from clinical advocates for urgently needed diagnostic tests to improve clinical decision-making and outcomes.

“We expect to receive potentially hundreds of ideas over the coming year,” Dr. Walt said. “We need to triage them into different buckets: clearly impactful ideas where we have an immediate technology solution and can make rapid progress, ideas where we need to do either biomarker discovery or significant technology development, and ideas where we need to understand the clinical problem better or may require additional engagement with the clinicians and market research.”

Dr. Rushdy Ahmad, head of the Diagnostic Accelerator, told MobiHealthNews those involved are now in the process of generating the list of high-value clinical problems in diagnostics that will go through the accelerator and noted the project-selection process is unbiased and disease agnostic.

He pointed out that in the age of personalized medicine, accurate diagnoses are essential, and these need to be deployed faster than ever.

“In order to increase efficiency and reduce the risk of delivering needed diagnostics in a timely manner, it’s critical for clinicians and technologists to initiate the process through this type of a research collaboration,” he said. “Technologists and clinicians cannot be successful in deploying diagnostics if they work in a vacuum.”