Importance of Development Partnerships

Recently there has been in influx of interest in the development of low cost medical devices for resource poor and developing country settings. This has spurned a great deal of passion and interest by students, faculty, and partners to develop prototypes and send teams for short stays to document future requirements as well as tweak existing designs. Examples of ingenious devices/products from the fruits of many hours of careful design and development have ranged from pill boxes to urine strips for monitoring ingestion of life saving medicines.

However, it is critical to incorporate these activities into a framework for proper testing and evaluation to ensure safety and efficacy of programs prior to human subjects testing. A challenge in developing markets is porous oversight, especially in rural communities to monitor pilot programs and report on results. Additionally, while international standards exist for good clinical practice, the cost of adhering to such standards is not tenable in many developing markets without further direct investment.

The good news is there are some world class clinical and laboratory infrastructures in place that have been developed due to large investments from organizations such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and center for disease control (CDC). However these structures have primarily been focused on infectious diseases, vaccine development, and surveillance activities. Rarely have these existing platforms been available to the social entrepreneur trying to innovate.

New methods for partnership and investment are required to transform the existing landscape to better serve the bottom of the pyramid. Such investment will create a platform to support the development of a well vetted pipeline of innovations in global health practice.