We aim to expand access to affordable, appropriate and sustainable medical technologies that address unmet health needs in the world’s most resource constrained populations – starting first with India and Sub-Saharan Africa.
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For the billions of people who live in poverty, in those parts of the world that are most resource constrained, infectious and non-communicable diseases, and a whole host of other medical complications, are a constant threat. Women and children are among the hardest hit. Too many die too soon or get sick, because they either are unable to afford the right medical care or because the right medical technologies have not been adapted to suit their settings.
Low cost medical technologies, adapted to the needs of low resource settings, could prevent millions of deaths, especially those among mothers and children, and slow the growing scourge of non-communicable diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.
While many innovative ideas have been developed to address these problems, the innovations are not reaching the populations that need them the most, because of pathway knowledge, funding, and numerous other business challenges.
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By bringing together leadership, knowledge and funding, we seek to nurture innovations and get them to the world’s most economically challenged populations.
Medical technology veterans and global health leaders want to contribute not just by donating or investing, but also by providing mentorship and leading the way to real solutions.
The world already possesses knowledge to increase access to life-saving and life-enhancing medical technologies for our most resource constrained settings:
A hybrid model of funding that combines a charity with an impact fund limited partnership could foster market discipline and help advance the most promising, viable, and self-sustaining innovations.
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“Our thesis is that by taking a sector-focused approach that brings together leadership, knowledge and funding, and leverages collaborations across sectors and disciplines, we may be able to help accelerate medical innovations that could benefit our most vulnerable citizens of the world, where the burden of preventable deaths is most concentrated.”
CO-FOUNDERS, TEAMFund
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE UNIQUE MODEL
We have structured TEAMFund to overcome the funding and knowledge gaps that are primary bottlenecks to our mission of bringing medical innovations to the world’s most resource constrained settings to create impact and access.
*“TEAMFund” refers to: (i) TEAMFund, Inc., a Delaware non-stock, not-for-profit corporation that has been recognized by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service as exempt from federal income taxation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended (the “Charity”); and (ii) TEAMFund LP, a Cayman Islands exempt limited partnership (corporation for U.S. federal tax purposes) (the “Fund”).
With TEAMFund, medical technology veterans and global health thought leaders can be part of a solution — a solution that harnesses a TEAM of innovators, cross-sectoral experts, facilitators, advocates, implementers, multilateral organizations, relevant governments, and the most important stakeholders of all: the populations who most urgently need these medical innovations, and their healthcare workers.
This collaborative construct graphic is adapted from a graphic initially prepared by Gary M. Cohen, Executive Vice President, Becton Dickinson Global Health.
Chairman/CEO of C.R. Bard; Co-Founder/Co-Chairman of TEAMFund
Co-Founder/Co-Chairman of TEAMFund
Managing Partner, TEAMFund LP
Executive Director (U.S.), Stanford-India Biodesign
Founding Partner, Lion’s Head Global Partners
Founder and CEO, Just Actions
Former President, COO, CFO, Director, Digene Corporation (now Qiagen N.V.)
Chief of Innovation, UNICEF
Vice Dean and Chief Medical Officer, NYU College of Global Public Health
Senior Advisor of TeamFund
WHO: The Power and Potential of Medical Devices
EmpowerRT, a North Carolina based social enterprise startup, whose mission is to empower low-resourced cancer clinics in developing countries with standard of care radiation therapy, announced that it has received the 2018 Global Health Innovator Award presented at this year’s The MedTech Conference powered by AdvaMed in Philadelphia, PA.
READ MORESEATTLE, WA – Shift Labs, Inc., a Seattle-based company building simple medical devices to reduce global healthcare gaps, announced that it has received the 2017 Global Health Innovator Award presented at this year’s The MedTech Conference powered by AdvaMed in San Jose, CA.
READ MOREMore than 80 percent of the estimated 3.2 million women who die before they turn fifty and the 6.3 million children who don’t make it to five live in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where just five countries are responsible for more than 40 percent of all deaths.
READ MORE“The grand challenges of global health cannot be solved by any one sector working alone. Development assistance for health is about $36B per year while private sector capital flows are much larger. Imagine a world where public and private sectors work together in financing, delivery and innovation to create a world that is healthy for all including the most vulnerable. Imagine a world where innovation helps to accelerate attainment of sustainable development goals. Moving towards such a world will require leadership from committed individuals. This is why I am such a fan of TEAMFund.”
CEO, Grand Challenges Canada
Support our work to develop low-cost medical technologies for the world’s neediest populations. You can choose to make a charitable donation or, subject to certain requirements, to contribute to our impact fund.
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Chairman/CEO of C.R. Bard; Co-Founder/Co-Chairman of TEAMFund
Co-Founder/Co-Chairman of TEAMFund
Managing Partner, TEAMFund LP
Executive Director (U.S.), Stanford-India Biodesign
Founding Partner, Lion’s Head Global Partners
Founder and CEO, Just Actions
Former President, COO, CFO, Director, Digene Corporation (now Qiagen N.V.)
Chief of Innovation, UNICEF
Vice Dean and Chief Medical Officer, NYU College of Global Public Health
Senior Advisor of TeamFund
“The MedTech Conference, aimed at identifying ways to accelerate innovation and support the deployment of affordable and appropriate medical technologies in the developing world. While innovative medical technologies have the potential to impact the lives of patients and healthcare workers worldwide, significant barriers keep many resource-constrained populations from accessing these technologies.”
EmpowerRT, a North Carolina based social enterprise startup, whose mission is to empower low-resourced cancer clinics in developing countries with standard of care radiation therapy, announced that it has received the 2018 Global Health Innovator Award presented at this year’s The MedTech Conference powered by AdvaMed in Philadelphia, PA.
EmpowerRT, a North Carolina based social enterprise startup, whose mission is to empower low-resourced cancer clinics in developing countries with standard of care radiation therapy, announced that it has received the 2018 Global Health Innovator Award presented at this year’s The MedTech Conference powered by AdvaMed in Philadelphia, PA.
| October 3, 2018: EmpowerRT training radiotherapy physicists and therapists on IMRT at the Cancer Diseases Hospital in Lusaka, Zambia. |
The Global Health Innovator Award was created as a part of the new Innovations in Global Health Program at The MedTech Conference, aimed at identifying ways to accelerate innovation and support the deployment of affordable and appropriate medical technologies in the developing world. While innovative medical technologies have the potential to impact the lives of patients and healthcare workers worldwide, significant barriers keep many resource-constrained populations from accessing these technologies.
According to the World Health Organization, cancer is the second leading cause of death globally, with an estimated 9.6 million related deaths in 2018. What is even more surprising is that approximately 70% of deaths from cancer will occur in Low to Middle-Income Countries (LMICs). As Sha Chang, Founder of EmpowerRT, emphatically states, “This huge disparity between High-Income Countries (HICs) and LMICs is simply unacceptable.”
While there have been significant advancements in radiation therapy technology, these modern digital solutions are simply too expensive for cancer clinics in LMICs and require clean power and water, technology infrastructure, and highly trained professionals. These solutions are currently not affordable nor easily adoptable.
EmpowerRT was formed to bring a clinically-proven, low cost Intensity Modulated Radiotherapy solution that has been standard of care for years in HICs and has been successfully used to control cancers in HICs for the same cancers that are contributing to an extremely high mortality rate in LMICs. Not only is this solution low-cost, but it is also recyclable and retrofittable.
Sha Chang, Founder of EmpowerRT, added, “As an organization, EmpowerRT is honored to receive this award, and we are excited because the TEAMFund initiative aligns so well with our vision of creating a world where people in every country can have access to standard of care radiation therapy, regardless of income. We are progressing quite well with the Republic of Zambia – Cancer Diseases Hospital, our first early adopter of EmpowerRT. With our low-cost solution, Zambia will be able to offer IMRT to their people for the first time ever.”
Chang, a Professor of Physics in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, is the leading authority on recyclable compensator-based IMRT and the in-house development of PLUNC – UNC’s radiotherapy planning software. EmpowerRT has licensed and is currently commercializing the same compensator-based IMRT solution that UNC has used for decades and aims to bring standard of care radiotherapy to cancer clinics, globally.
“Leading medtech industry groups launch a new initiative and award to accelerate innovation of affordable, appropriate solutions for resource-constrained global markets.”
Shift Labs, Inc., a Seattle-based company building simple medical devices to reduce global healthcare gaps, announced that it has received the 2017 Global Health Innovator Award presented at this year’s The MedTech Conference powered by AdvaMed in San Jose, CA.
SEATTLE, WA – Shift Labs, Inc., a Seattle-based company building simple medical devices to reduce global healthcare gaps, announced that it has received the 2017 Global Health Innovator Award presented at this year’s The MedTech Conference powered by AdvaMed in San Jose, CA.
The Global Health Innovator Award was created as a part of the new Innovations in Global Health Program at The MedTech Conference, aimed at identifying ways to accelerate innovation and support the deployment of affordable and appropriate medical technologies in the developing world. While innovative medical technologies have the potential to impact the lives of patients and healthcare workers worldwide, significant barriers keep many resource-constrained populations from accessing these technologies.
The $50,000 award, given in partnership by TEAMFund and MedTech Innovator with support from medtech leaders BD, Medtronic, and Stryker, recognizes an early stage medical company that has a novel, appropriate and sustainable medical device for the world’s resource-constrained populations.
“This is the inaugural year for this award, and it represents a significant step forward in work towards health equity,” said Beth Kolko, CEO of Shift Labs. “Being a part of the MedTech Innovator program brought Shift Labs to the attention of TEAMFund, which has helped catalyze a movement and provide unparalleled leadership in raising awareness of the tremendous impact the medtech industry can have on global health indicators. As an industry, we need to take a serious look at the market opportunity and be bold in how we create technologies for those markets.”
Shift Labs created its DripAssist Infusion Rate Monitor to address a key gap in care worldwide – the need for better ways to administer IV infusions. Over 8 million unmonitored IV treatments are given every day. Without the right tools to ensure accuracy, clinicians are forced to count drops by hand and estimate drug dosage. This means that children, mothers in labor, surgery patients and other vulnerable patients constantly receive the wrong dose of medications.
DripAssist make it possible for any health worker to easily set up IV infusions and precisely monitor the rate at which medication or fluids are delivered. Designed to overcome the constraints of low-resource settings – such as cost and gaps in infrastructure, clinician training and supply chains – DripAssist is the only FDA-cleared, CE-marked IV infusion tool that is portable, runs off one AA battery, and takes about 5 minutes to learn. DripAssist has been used in over two dozen countries to date, everywhere from rural Zimbabwe hospitals to chemotherapy centers in the US.
Kolko added, “As an organization, Shift Labs is honored to receive this award, and we’re exceptionally excited because the TEAMFund initiative aligns so well with our vision of creating sustainable medical devices that fit the needs of many markets worldwide. The award marks a new level of recognition from experienced industry leaders for our DripAssist product – but we’re perhaps even more enthusiastic about the increasing momentum in the medical device industry that sees how great design can close persistent healthcare gaps.”
Kolko, a Professor of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington, is a proponent of human centered design as a technology development methodology to create products with global appeal. Shift Labs incorporates human centered approaches throughout their product design and corporate strategy in order to meet healthcare needs of broad populations worldwide.
About Shift Labs
Shift Labs, Inc. is a Seattle-based company that creates well-designed medical devices for fast-growing healthcare sectors, from specialty health care in the US to clinical care in emerging markets. The DripAssist Infusion Rate Monitor is their first FDA-cleared, CE-marked product and has previously been recognized as one of Popular Science Magazine’s 12 Best Healthcare Innovations of 2016, as well as receiving a Silver medal from the Industrial Designers Society of America IDEA awards and a grant from USAID as part of the Fighting Ebola Grand Challenge.
Learn more at www.shiftlabs.com
About TEAMFund
Transforming Equity and Access in Medtech (TEAMFund) is an organization that combines a non-profit side with an impact fund limited partnership, with a shared aim to expand access to affordable, appropriate and sustainable medical technologies that address unmet health needs in the world’s most resource constrained populations. TEAMFund is co-founded and co-chaired by Timothy Ring, CEO of Bard, and Kathryn Gleason, and counts among their members the leading medtech companies worldwide.
About MedTech Innovator
MedTech Innovator is the industry’s nonprofit global competition and accelerator for medical device, digital health and diagnostic companies. Our mission is to improve the lives of patients by accelerating the growth of companies that are transforming the healthcare system. MedTech Innovator 2017 features 100 companies that address one or more of the transformative themes identified in an annual survey of leading manufacturers and providers.
Inquiries:
Contact CEO Beth Kolko, beth@shiftlabs.com, or CTO Koji Intlekofer, koji@shiftlabs.com at +1 206.369.1216.
“For women, new technologies that can prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and TB by making rapid testing easy, accurate and closer to home are a top priority.”
Leith Greenslade is the Founder and CEO of Just Actions, an organization working to accelerate global progress/collaboration on a variety of fronts, including global health and innovation. Before that, she was a Vice-Chair at the MDG Health Alliance, a special initiative of the Office of the United Nations Special Envoy for Financing the Health Millennium Development Goals in support of Every Woman, Every Child, an unprecedented movement spearheaded by the United Nations Secretary-General to advance the health of women and children. Leith is a member of the Board of TEAMFund.
There is a simple formula for shortlisting innovations with the greatest capacity to achieve the new Sustainable Development Goals for women’s and children’s health: Step 1: Isolate the largest populations where preventable deaths among women and children are concentrated and identify their leading causes. Step 2: Determine the innovations that target the leading causes most cost-effectively. Step 3: Invest in the development and uptake of these innovations in ways that strengthen local economic development. A critical point that is too often overlooked – the secret of success lies not just in the what of health innovations (Step 2), but in the where (Step 1) and the how (Step 3).
It all starts with the where.
More than 80 percent of the estimated 3.2 million women who die before they turn fifty and the 6.3 million children who don’t make it to five live in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where just five countries are responsible for more than 40 percent of all deaths – India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ethiopia. Deaths are not evenly spread in these countries but cluster in specific sub-regions, especially the northern States of India and Nigeria, the heavily populated eastern Provinces of Pakistan, the northern Provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the central regions of Ethiopia. As many of these areas are experiencing rapid urbanization, deaths are no longer clustered in rural regions alone.
And what is killing women and children in these areas?
Essentially the same few causes. For women of reproductive age (15 to 49), HIV-AIDS, deaths in pregnancy and childbirth, tuberculosis, heart disease, and self-harm are the top five leading causes of death, while among children under five, pneumonia, preterm birth, birth trauma, malaria and diarrhea dominate. Innovations with proven capacity to cost-effectively prevent, diagnose and treat these ten threats are our best bets to accelerate achievement of the new global health goals.
Putting all of this together and coming up with a priority list of the highest-impact medical innovations is not difficult.
For women, new technologies that can prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and TB by making rapid testing easy, accurate and closer to home are a top priority. Diagnostic tests that can identify women at high risk of pregnancy complications early on could prevent many maternal and newborn deaths. Integrated diagnostic platforms that include the major infectious diseases and chronic conditions that threaten healthy pregnancies are also desperately needed. Invisible, long-lasting, self-administered contraceptive devices that combine protection from sexually transmitted diseases are potentially transformative. And the entire field of innovations that reduce the burden of mental health disorders among women in low resource settings is wide open. For children, devices that can quickly, accurately and easily identify pneumonia together with new devices to deliver oxygen (e.g. bubble CPAP, oxygen concentrators) are needed to drive down the high death toll from pneumonia. For malaria endemic countries, the holy grail is a rapid diagnostic test that can identify viral pneumonia, bacterial pneumonia and malaria in minutes. And an entire suite of products is needed to retool the NICU for low resource settings, ranging from resuscitation devices to infant warmers to human milk banks.
How these innovations are developed, financed and ultimately made available to these target populations matters.
Innovations that emerge from their country contexts or that are sourced elsewhere and adapted locally by local institutions, often in partnership with external stakeholders, stand the best chance of success. As private financing for development now dwarfs foreign aid by more than 8 to 1, investment vehicles that crowd in private capital have the greatest potential for impact. These vehicles will need to work in close partnership with public sector stakeholders – at the local, national, regional and global levels – who can smooth the path to impact by subsidizing the costs of early stage innovation (e.g. R&D and pilot testing costs), by building a robust pipeline of investable high-impact projects that are ranked according to global health impact, and by connecting all of the partners. And as the private health sector dominates in many of the countries with the steepest health challenges, the path to impact for many of these innovations travels right through local private health sectors.
Not every innovation will be equally important in every setting.
Africa’s higher fertility rates and infectious disease burden make contraceptive and infectious disease diagnosis and treatment technologies highly prized, while South Asia’s higher burdens of maternal and newborn deaths and non-communicable diseases call for innovations that reduce the risks of pregnancy and childbirth, and relieve the growing chronic disease burden. Where investment vehicles can use their private sector capital and expertise to match the innovations to the markets where they can save the most lives, they will make a major contribution to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. For these vehicles, success will be measured in the scale of lives saved and sickness averted, and in the way their investments lay a solid foundation for local medtech market development. Further, where private medtech dollars – offered as loans, subsidies, guarantees, grants and/or equity – find their way to companies that pursue shared value strategies and/or to local start-up social businesses they have the potential to leave a lasting legacy of better health for future generations of women and children.