Stanford University, 2006 - $37,500

This grant supports the Global Health by Design (GHbD) project, an innovation fellowship that will address world health challenges through medical device design at Stanford University. The fellowship will be a collaboration between anthropology, engineering, medicine, public health, international economic policy, and business. The fellowship is built on the assumption that, in order to create and disseminate effective medical technologies in developing countries, the process needs to take place within sustainable businesses and industries in those same countries.

NCIIA funding is going toward cross-institution planning, which will take place for one year and include: choosing a host country, making connections with key colleagues in that country to facilitate the clinical immersion of the fellows, and finding partners in the host country to actualize the business plan and fund raising. GHbD will recruit four fellows, one of whom might be from the host country, and will train the fellows through a six-week boot camp that will include classroom lectures on health care, background on needs identification, information on basic biomedical technologies, an introduction to intellectual property, health care regulation, and basic health care technology economics. Fellows will travel to the host country in September for a three-month immersion, during which they will participate in the local health care delivery system and identify at least 250 clinical needs. On returning to Stanford, the fellows will process the clinical needs, conduct extensive research on forty of them, develop a detailed written profile of the clinical background, and present the profile to a faculty from the host country. Following this, fellows will invent several solutions to each problem. The solutions will be evaluated for technical feasibility, practicality, cost and manufacturability. Students from the Biodesign Innovation Class will further develop these concepts and GHbD fellows will serve as TAs for the course.