Biomedical Devices and Equipment Consortium Organization to Roadmap Industry (BIOCOR)

Goal: To create a consortium that will stimulate the growth and increase the global competitiveness of the U.S. Biomedical Devices and Equipment (BDE) industry by developing a roadmap addressing the technical and manufacturing challenges facing this industry.

Lead: University of Southern California
Information Sciences Institute
4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 1001
Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6611

Award Number: 70NANB15H063

Federal Funding: $500,000

Project Duration: 24 months

The University of Southern California (USC) and its Information Sciences Institute (USC-ISI), in collaboration with leading BDE companies, researchers at leading universities, and other institutions and partners, will create BIOCOR, which focuses on the BDE industry. BIOCOR is based on an existing consortium at USC's Biomedical Engineering Department.

Its objectives are to:

• Within the BDE industry, identify major technical and manufacturing challenges facing the industry from a national perspective.
• Prioritize these challenges.
• Develop a technology roadmap, along with companion technology maturation and development plans, to address the challenges.
• Help define a technology platform that can be used by a group of companies in sharing technology and promoting open source standards, thus fostering collaboration among BDE companies.

With a growth rate of more than 25 percent, BDE is a major contributor to the expansion of the bioscience industry, of which it is a subsector. But future growth is not assured. The industry faces numerous challenges, in part because it includes a number of small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). Such companies have difficulties with the long lead times and the high cost of doing research and developing the manufacturing methods that the technology requires. International competition is also increasing, not just from countries with established BDE industries, but also economies such as Brazil, Singapore, and China that are laying the groundwork for them. Developing a plan that fosters collaboration among SMEs in the industry and helps accelerate the path from precompetitive research to product manufacturing will grow the U.S. BDE industry and increase its global competitiveness through technology superiority.

For project information: Barbara Reguengo, (310) 574-1623, reguengo [at] usc.edu (reguengo[at]usc[dot]edu)

Funded Participants:

• Columbia University
• University of Maryland
• University of Minnesota
• USC - Institute for Biomedical Therapeutics
• USC -Center for Economic Development

AMTech Project Manager: Jean-Louis Staudenmann, (301) 975-4866, jean-louis.staudenmann [at] nist.gov (jean-louis[dot]staudenmann[at]nist[dot]gov)