An interdisciplinary team led by Cornell University has received a five-year grant from US medical research agency the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to launch a new centre for engineering, testing and commercialising point-of-care diagnostic devices that will have international reach.
The centre, Point of Care Technologies for Nutrition, Infection and Cancer for Global Health (PORTENT), will be led by David Erickson, the Sibley College Professor of Mechanical Engineering in Cornell Engineering, and Dr Saurabh Mehta, the Janet and Gordon Lankton Professor in the Division of Nutritional Sciences, which is housed jointly in the College of Human Ecology and College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
PORTENT will be funded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), Fogarty International Center and the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health – components of the NIH.
“The centre can be imagined as an incubator, taking mid-stage technologies for nutrition, infection and cancer, with particular relevance to global health, where we will provide them the technological development support, funding to move their work forward, and expertise in validating and disseminating their work,” Dr Mehta said.
The centre is the latest addition to NIBIB’s series of initiatives that develop and disseminate technologies with clinical applications through multidisciplinary partnerships, such as one that accelerated the production of rapid diagnostics for SARS-CoV-2.
Partnering with Cornell in PORTENT will be a number of universities and health organizations. New technologies will be validated at four clinical sites: Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City; St. John’s Research Institute in India; the Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral in Ecuador; and the Infectious Diseases Institute in Kampala in Uganda. This clinical and validation core will be co-led by Dr. Marshall Glesby, professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Weill Cornell Medicine, and Julia Finkelstein, associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition in the Division of Nutritional Sciences.