From the Senior Vice Provost for Research

For too long, academic research languished on the bench, relegated to journals consumed by insular, elite audiences. But the world has changed. The need for real-time fixes to global problems, from health care to the environment, requires our ingenuity and intellectual discipline. We embrace that challenge, and what’s more, we’re ready to adopt new ways to meet it. Primary among them is collaborating on ideas, early on in their development, with the outside experts who will help us translate them into beneficial technologies.

Point-of-care technologies are a case in point. They have the potential to improve health outcomes for millions of people in resource-poor regions across the globe, including impoverished pockets in wealthy nations. Operated by non-experts, including patients themselves, at-home diagnostic devices can help untold others stay on top of chronic disorders and out of emergency rooms. As chair of the NIH Point-of-Care Technologies Research Network’s (POCTRN) Independent Expert Board, and from my own three decades of experience in translational research, I strongly believe the pathway to a healthier global society will depend on precise and affordable point-of-care technologies to ensure more early diagnoses and effective therapeutic interventions. There is no better model to follow than the highly coordinated effort to speed the development, manufacture and deployment of COVID-19 test kits during the pandemic. Launched by POCTRN in April 2020, the Shark Tank-style initiative known as RADx, (Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics) resulted in 52 FDA authorizations and the distribution of more than seven million tests, some of them by the end of that summer.

But how do we replicate and expand upon that extraordinary success to address other problems, from the spread of new pathogens, to fetal health monitoring, to cancer detection? RADx developers, after all, received feedback all along the way from distinguished subject matter experts and seasoned entrepreneurs. They had an unusually interactive relationship with government regulators. As the Chief Research Officer of NJIT, I have made collaborative research and innovation partnerships a priority. This helps inventors determine early on whom their technology will help, how people will use it and even how to produce it. Two years ago, we launched the Technology Innovation Translation Acceleration (TITA) program, which drills down on the potential commercial benefits of university research at the earlier stages of the translation and market validation process. TITA provides seed grants of up to $75,000 per project over three phases of development, as well as guidance and feedback from an industrial advisory board. Inventors must have external partners.

The NSF’s Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships recently awarded us $6 million to expand that program, which brings vital additional funding to move research past the initial proof of concept to determine interest and acceptance by potential users and identify purchasers of the technology, such as clinicians, municipalities or businesses. The award will also strengthen the university’s entrepreneurial culture by funding training workshops in technology translation for undergraduates, Ph.D. students, postdoctoral researchers and faculty, through the newly created Center for Translational Research at NJIT.

Our job is to turn this center into a hub for commercialization training and development on campus, but also into a meeting place to receive feedback on our ideas and to generate new ones. Through workshops, forums and demonstration events, we will draw external collaborators, advisors and investors, as well as people in the community with their own thoughts about what’s needed. We intend to listen.

Atam P. Dhawan
Senior Vice Provost for Research