Massachusetts Expands Digital Health R&D Sandbox Program – Adds Sites in Amherst, Bedford, Lowell, & Worcester

• MITRE Digital Health Sandbox in Bedford;
• The UMass Amherst Institute for Applied Life Sciences;
• UMass Lowell; and
• UMass Medical School in Worcester.

• MeHI has awarded a $95,000 grant to TechSpring @ Baystate Health to work with two startups, BlocHealth of Boston and Nutrimedy of Brookline, to access TechSpring’s product development acceleration services and work with experienced Innovation Managers to test and validate their products in a real healthcare environment.
• The second award, a $60,000 grant, will go to MIT’s Institute of Medical and Engineering Sciences (IMES) to cover the fees for Leuko Labs of Boston to perform usability testing of their product on volunteers in replicated home and clinical settings.

• MITRE Digital Health Sandbox – Bedford, Mass. – MITRE’s mission-driven teams are dedicated to solving problems for a safer world. Through public-private partnerships and federally funded R&D centers, MITRE works across government and in partnership with industry to discover new possibilities, create unexpected opportunities, and lead by pioneering together for the public good to bring innovative ideas into existence. Within this sandbox, MITRE offers access to domain and technical expertise, open source software tools and artifacts, and unique test facilities to lower the barrier for access to data, improve healthcare interoperability, and increase the security of medical devices in care settings.
• UMass Medical School – Worcester, Mass. – The UMass Center for Clinical and Translational Science (UMCCTS) leverages the strong scientific environment of UMass with the clinical strengths of its health system partners to build an ecosystem that transcends traditional departmental and organizational boundaries and encourages collaborative problem-solving with communities and across historically siloed disciplines such as the biological, physical, computational, and engineering sciences. UMCCTS provides facilitated access for inventors and entrepreneurs to 50 research cores at UMMS and four primary validation environments: the Data Science Core (with the UMMS Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences), the Massachusetts Medical Device Development Center, the interprofessional Center for Experiential Learning and Simulation, and D3Health.
• UMass Amherst Institute for Applied Life Sciences – Amherst, Mass. – The UMass Amherst Institute for Applied Life Sciences translates fundamental research into innovative product candidates, technologies, and services that deliver benefits to human health and well-being. IALS offers more than 30 Core Facilities, available to both internal and external users enabling faculty, students, and industry collaborators to access a broad array of equipment to enhance their R&D capabilities, address both basic and translational questions, deliver technologies and product candidates more rapidly, and become more competitive in obtaining state, federal, foundation, and private funding. The facilities include a state-of-the-art testbed for performing mobile health experiments at scale, the Center for Human Health and Performance, a roll-to-roll fabrication and processing facility, and leasable research laboratory space.
• UMass Lowell – Lowell, Mass. – UMass Lowell, both through its robust Core Research Facility and M2D2, its incubator program for emerging life sciences startups, translates fundamental research into innovative products and technologies. UMass Lowell and M2D2 offer 10 Core Facilities with over 100 instruments, lab space and services. These allow inventors and entrepreneurs to access a broad array of equipment and human capital to enhance their R&D capabilities, address both basic and translational questions, deliver technologies and products more rapidly, and become more competitive in obtaining state, federal, foundation, and private funding.

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Visit the Mass Digital Health Sandbox