Technology Core

Project Summary/Abstract – Technology Core The goal of the Center for Advancing Point of Care Technologies (CAPCaT) in Heart, Lung, Blood, and Sleep Disorders (HLBS) is to develop and optimize novel point of care technologies (POC) and home-based technologies to improve the diagnosis and treatment of HLBS disorders, especially those targeted for low resource settings. HLBS disorders collectively represent the single greatest source of morbidity and mortality in the US, and they disproportionately affect minoritized and underserved populations. New POC and home-based technologies are critical enablers of the ongoing transformation of healthcare, which is moving out from specialized inpatient testing facilities into the clinic and the home. CAPCaT was originally based on the highly successful medical product incubator, the Massachusetts Medical Device Development Center (M2D2), at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Lowell and UMass Chan campuses. UMass Lowell has strengths in engineering and business, while the Worcester campus houses the UMass Chan Medical School, the first and only public academic health system in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Over the past five years, CAPCaT has conducted four national calls for applications and from 441 applicants has selected, awarded, monitored, and comprehensively supported 23 HLBS POC innovations. CAPCaT awardees have raised over $43M in funding, refined/developed new products, generated 9 new intellectual properties, and brought new technologies to market. In this competitive renewal, the Technology Core of CAPCaT will continue to issue broad-reaching calls for applications and will select and support new meritorious projects focusing on later-stage POC and home- based technologies from across the HLBS space. Selection will be based on performance and potential for clinical impact, likelihood of implementation and addressing an HLBS health disparity. CAPCaT’s Technology Core will support selected projects utilizing a strong collection of existing resources at UMass Lowell and UMass Chan to help further develop and refine later-stage prototypes to the point of validation and user-testing.