A medical education teaching tool and software to speed up the diagnosis of electroencephalograms were a couple of the research projects picked for funding in the University City Science Center’s QED Proof of Concept program, according to a statement from the Science Center. The program invests in medical technology.
Dr. Joseph Picone, an electrical engineering professor at Temple University, got $100,000 to advance his EEG reporting software to automatically analyze readings and inform diagnosis.
In an emailed response to questions, Picone said the software runs in real time. As soon as the EEG is finished, the diagnosis and annotations are available. He said it could speed up diagnosis for EEG scans which currently can take several days to a week to read and report. “We don’t want to paint physicians in a bad light since they are the customers for this technology. But obviously their process of manually reading these EEGs is time-consuming and a productivity bottleneck.” The project is part of the award program’s digital health track.
Dr. Christof Daetwyler of Drexel University College of Medicine produced an online teaching tool to improve physician interactions with patients using practice, assessment and feedback. The company is called WebPatientEncounter. The idea is to boost patient satisfaction scores for hospitals which would otherwise face reduced Medicare reimbursement. He received a $100,000 award.
Digital health was introduced as a category last year. Projects typically get funding partly through the Science Center and partly through the researcher’s university. But in another change to the program, the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation is funding a portion of the awards, through Startup PHL with a $500,000 loan. The program attracted 65 submissions from 14 universities in the Philadelphia region.
On the biotechnology front, two researchers received $200,000 each. Dr. Samuel Gunderson of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, got his second award to validate a new therapeutic compound for pancreatic cancer. Gunderson previously got QED funding in 2010 for gene technology that’s now at the heart of his company, Silagene. Benjamin Blass of Temple University leads a program that is developing a potential drug therapy for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
