News: IMES collaborates with Miami-Dade County to accelerate medical technology innovation

IMES and Miami-Dade County establish the Global Co-Creation Lab in Miami, to develop medical technologies for the benefit of the community.

In an effort to accelerate innovation and new technologies in health care, Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos A. Gimenez is working with the leaders of the MIT Institute of Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) on an exciting private-public collaboration that will draw upon local scientific and entrepreneurial talent, investors and IMES’ scientific heft to tackle global health challenges.

Earlier this year, the Gimenez Administration initially provided $250,000 in seed money to eMerge Americas, a Miami technology event connecting the Americas, to serve as a catalyst for IMES to set up the Global Co-Creation Lab (GCCL), a health and medicine high-tech concentrator. In the 2019-2020 fiscal budget, the Board of County Commissioners approved another $1 million for GCCL.

“Miami-Dade County has been leading nationally in start-ups creation for several years now, but this new collaboration with IMES takes it to the global level and leverages our County’s assets as the Gateway to the Americas and a growing international center for trade to expand globally Miami’s role as a hub for health-care innovation,” Mayor Carlos A. Gimenez said. “I’m very excited by the possibilities to grow this network of collaboration with a community-based and international consortium of industry collaborators. With our network of excellent hospitals and medical schools, along with the potential to grow engineering programs, Miami-Dade County is poised to better serve our very diverse community with breakthroughs in medical technologies.”

The GCCL will work on challenges in health with a focus on Miami and the Americas–through a global network of leaders in medicine, science, and technology. Its objective is the co-creation of breakthrough medical-related technologies, by working on local health problems and leveraging Miami’s unique comparative advantages. These new technologies and solutions can lead to the globalized impact of Miami-created innovation-based enterprises. The GCCL will reach out to a wide variety of local organizations to form a community-based, pre-competitive consortium of industry collaborators, whose contribution will help accelerate the path from laboratory to market.  The consortium will emphasize a community-first, horizontal collaboration, as a key component of this effort’s success.

“We have a moral imperative to accelerate innovation and introduce transformational technologies to society at faster rates,” stated Elazer Edelman, director of IMES, and the Edward J. Poitras Professor in Medical Engineering and Science, MIT. “This collaboration advances research and introduces an actionable technological roadmap with regional and global impact” said Mercedes Balcells-Camps, principal research scientist of MIT IMES, and program director at GCCL IMES.

“This collaboration is a result of a collective effort to fill a need, and we’re extremely proud of the work we’ve done to identify the most qualified collaborator, the Global Co-Creation Lab at IMES, to execute this initiative and catalyze our city as a global hub,” said Melissa Medina, President of eMerge Americas.

“We are honored to collaborate with a global leader such as MIT IMES to accelerate the ongoing transformation of Miami as the nexus for healthcare innovation,” added Felice Gorordo, CEO of eMerge Americas, which will be an anchor collaborator for the health innovation content track at the upcoming eMerge Americas conference on March 30-31, 2020.