UCLA Health joins the University of Southern California (USC) and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles(CHLA) to support and expand the Southern California Consortium for Technology and Innovation in Pediatrics (CTIP). CTIP is an FDA-funded Pediatric Device Consortia (PDC) dedicated to promoting and advancing the commercialization of pediatric medical devices. It was established to address the most important component missing from pediatric device innovation: simultaneously engaging clinicians, engineers, regulators, hospital administrators, patients and the business community in the processes of technology assessment and development. Dr. Daniel Levi and Desert Horse-Grant are members of CTIP’s steering committee. They will provide the Consortium with strategic guidance as well as access to business, financial, regulatory, reimbursement, engineering, scientific, clinical and intellectual property expertise. The duo will also provide resources to help develop and commercialize pediatric medical devices. The proposed new program, known as the West Coast CTIP, will be able to offer several $50,000 awards a year for both direct or indirect services to inventors with concept to commercialization milestones. It will also expand resources to inventors through partnerships with the major pediatric academic centers on the West Coast. Dr. Levi is a member of the the UCLA Children’s Discovery and Innovation Institute (CDI). The CDI was founded to enhance the culture for innovation and groundbreaking collaborative research spanning from molecule to community. (Please link the words at the beginning to the CDI site).
“We know that developing products specifically for pediatric patients can present unique challenges to device developers and there are still many unmet needs for children with serious, debilitating or rare diseases. This is why we continue to work to encourage device innovation for medical conditions that impact young populations. Our Pediatric Device Consortia Grant Program is one of a number of initiatives underway to foster the development and approval of safe and effective pediatric-specific medical devices.” – Scott Gottlieb, M.D., FDA