Newswise — The National Institutes of Health today announced the winners of its NIH Technology Accelerator Challenge (NTAC) for Maternal Health, a prize competition for developers of diagnostic technologies to help improve maternal health around the world. Pregnancy and childbirth complications are a major global health problem. Tragically, these complications result in the deaths of more than 800 women and 7,000 newborns each day. Low-cost diagnostics that operate at the point-of-care and can detect and differentiate among common conditions associated with pregnancy are needed to help reduce the high rates of maternal morbidity and mortality in low-resource settings.
The winning technologies share a total of $1 million in prizes for the successful design and development of diagnostic tests and platform technologies to reduce maternal morbidity and mortality. The prize competition is managed by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and with support from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health.
“This competition prioritized technologies that could have life-saving impact on women, families, and communities, and provide health care workers with technologies they can readily integrate into practice with their patients,” said NIBIB Director Bruce J. Tromberg, Ph.D. “We congratulate the teams who entered this field of competition with their innovative device designs and platform technologies, as well as articulating a pathway for translation and use of their innovations for global health settings.”