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An event to spur innovative medtech solutions for pressing challenges around oncology prevention, diagnostics and care will be held February 27-28, 2016, in Boston.
The Consortium for Affordable Medical Technologies (CAMTech), Global Oncology, and the MGH Cancer Center will hold a Global Cancer Innovation Hack-a-thon to catalyze affordable medical technology, business models and process innovations to transform cancer prevention, diagnosis, and care in resource-limited settings.
This collaborative and entrepreneurial initiative will serve as an open innovation platform for a global community of clinicians, engineers, and entrepreneurs, industry experts and end-users to co-crete innovations over a 48-hour period. Teams — through cross-disciplinary collaboration, mentorship, time/resource constraints and award incentives — can accelerate ideas into breakthrough innovations that have the potential to shift the paradigm of care for cancer globally.
In the U.S. we know that cancer treatment is expensive and is not always successful. If cancers are found at early stages, they are more likely to be treated successfully. In the U.S. and Europe, the stage at which cancers are found is going down: instead of finding cancers only when they are symptomatic and have likely already spread (stages 3-4), they are more often found at early stages, often because the person is getting a scan for something else, and the cancer is spotted on the scan (“incidental findings” of tumors at stages 1-2).
In the developing world, however, where most of the world’s population lives, cancers are still found most often at stages 3-4, when treatment is much more expensive and hazardous. And the truth is, the health care systems in these countries are not prepared to deal with late-stage cancer treatments.
The Consortium for Global Health at the Massachusetts General Hospital is working to shift that paradigm through this special event, which will soure innovative solutions for pressing challenges around oncology prevention, diagnostics and care.
While applications for the event have closed, CAMTech encourages you to follow @CAMTechMGH on Twitter and visit the event Facebook page for live updates, discussions on specific cancer-related challenges, and highlights from the amazing cancer-related medical technologies that come out of the Hack-a-thon.
Joyce and Robin talk with CAMTech’s Medical Director, Dr. Kristian Olson, about the organization’s work and the goal of the upcoming Hack-a-thon as well as talk about some of the technologies that have come from CAMTech’s previous events and initiatives.
Kristian Olson, MD, MPH, DTM&H
Medical Director, Consortium for Affordable Medical Technology
Kristian Olson is the Medical Director of the Consortium for Affordable Medical Technologies (CAMTech). He is both a Pediatrician and Internist and serves as a Clinician Educator at the Massachusetts General Hospital and an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School. He has worked in Darfur, Indonesia, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Uganda, and India, is a serial innovator and one of the architects of the CAMTech Innovation platform.
He completed an undergraduate degree in biology at the University of British Columbia, medical school at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and his residency training in the Combined Harvard Medicine and Pediatrics Program. He trained in the Masters of Public Health program at the University of Sydney as a US Fulbright Scholar and completed a Diploma in Tropical Medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2003.
In 2009, he was named to the Scientific American Top 10 Honor Roll as an individual who has demonstrated leadership in applying new technologies and biomedical discoveries for the benefit of humanity.
For more information, contact CAMtech using their Contace form at http://www.globalhealthmgh.org/camtech/contact-us/
