NASA is interested in novel health products that will find meaningful use in space. For that it is funding a new crowdsourcing platform that is aimed to connect NASA’s venture arm, as well as large health systems, researchers, life science companies and others, to a global network of early-stage entrepreneurs.
The initiative called Collaborative Health Innovation Platform (CHIP) was announced Sunday during the annual SXSW conference and festival in Austin. The grant to create the platform came from the Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH) that is funded by the space agency. The platform will be created by researchers from Rice University and Energizing Health, a healthcare innovation company that hosts events with the goal of connecting entrepreneurs to investors.
“The CHIP platform is not just about research – It has implications for the global health and medtech startup community,” said Brian Lang, CEO, Energizing Health in a statement. “Our research with Rice will arm us with better knowledge about the needs of startups and large organizations. CHIP can then integrate those insights in a constantly growing machine learning environment that can be made available to large organizations who are looking for startups with specific technologies or solutions.”
In other words, AI will be doing the matchmaking between users of the platform – be it hospitals or life science institutions, academics, and NASA – who identify specific certain problems and those entrepreneurs with technology that can solve them.
“We want smart AI to do source innovation for us rather than me having to go to thousands of conferences like this one to find wonderful companies,” explained Dorit Donoviel, director of TRISH in a panel discussion on Saturday as she introduced the CHIP project prior to its official launch. “It customizes my search and we’re inviting partners to join us.”
What are some problems NASA is looking to solve? One is point-of-care diagnostics – in essence, lab-on-a-chip that could deal with bloodwork in space, she said.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Per the CHIP Grant Abstract, “CHIP’s searchable database will first be populated by TRISH personnel as well as curated data from leading innovation hubs, including but not limited to CrunchBase, AngelList, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) database of funded intellectual property from the National Library of Medicine, and others.”
There are various organizations that work in marrying healthcare startups to investors in one way or another – you have Kickstarter, Indiegogo to crowdfund projects. Then you have the accelerators and consultants who link entrepreneurs in healthcare to health systems and other large healthcare organizations – StartUp Health, Healthbox that got acquired by HIMSS and Avia Health Innovation are a few that come to mind.
But an AI-powered platform that builds a database of novel startups and allows users with defined pain points to customize searches to narrow the list of startups that can alleviate that problem seems a novel twist to the healthcare innovation tale.
