University Of Massachusetts, Lowell

Massachusetts has been hard hit during the pandemic in terms of unemployment and other economic development metrics. M2D2, a member of the BARDA DRIVe Incubator Network, will create the IMPACT project, which will benefit Greater Lowell, as well as the entire Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

This project will focus on the urgent need to develop health security and biomedical technologies that provide rapid feedback to both caregivers and patients in order to effect timely changes in patient self-care, symptom detection, diagnosis, and treatment delivery. In particular, the Innovative Medical Products – Action, Commercialization, Technology (IMPACT) project will accelerate new evidence-based, user-friendly, patient-centric technologies to detect threats pre-symptomatically, to monitor health/medical status in people as they go about their daily lives out of the clinic, to respond quickly as needed, and to deliver actionable reports. IMPACT participants will complete an intensive 12-session, 12-week program, with each session assisting and educating 10 promising startups selected through a competitive process. Each startup company will comprise a team and IMPACT will add a business, a clinical and an engineering lead to each.

Our objectives are to:

1. Identify startups with novel, promising health security solutions and biotechnologies who have been negatively impacted by the pandemic and, through training, stakeholder engagement and through deployment of resources;
2. Support developmental plans, including pathways to adoption in healthcare settings and in the marketplace; and
3. Train and disseminate novel health security solutions and biotechnologies to the different stakeholders.