Discussing the History and Trajectory of NIBIB
Dr. Bruce Tromberg, Director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), recently joined us for an alliance discussion on the history and trajectory of NIBIB and bioengineering as a tool and industry. Dr. Tromberg explained how NIBIB focused on collaboration to develop cutting-edge technology in service of health science breakthroughs. He covered the Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics Initiative (RADx), which NIBIB championed as a response to COVID-19, and shared how the institute has integrated artificial intelligence into its work. Dr. Tromberg’s thorough overview of the program and its achievements demonstrates the value of NIBIB and its impact on the health technology landscape. Here is a short Q&A based on his discussion:
Q: Please describe NIBIB’s Mission:
A: “Engineering and imaging technologies are really quite essential to everything. It is right in the mission of all the institutes and centers. It helps drive discovery. We’re one of the few institutes that really allows you to focus on technology development for its own sake. We partner with virtually every [NIH] institute and center to develop collaborations to drive advances in these technologies in application-oriented ways. […] NIH truly is a technology-based Institute. I know that many people think DOD, DOE, [and] NSF are primarily focused on technology, but NIH makes really important, very large-scale types of investment in the development of technology.”
Q: How does the collaboration work?
A: “I just want to emphasize [that] at NIBIB you don’t have to have a disease focus. So, we encourage people to come to us with technologies that they’re very passionate about and want to develop and then work with our collaborators to bring them to bear on hard problems in biology and medicine.”
Q: What is the role RADx in addressing COVID-19?:
A: “We launched RADx at the end of April in 2020 and our real goal was to shift the paradigm from primarily lab testing, which had lots of operational challenges, to things that were in the home and point of care and develop millions of tests per month. To get this really off the ground, we built on our Point of Care Technology Research Network (POCTRN). These are multiple sites working in partnership all around the country. We’d already invested in it, but we asked the entire network to shift their emphasis from the work they’re doing and [to] focus exclusively on COVID.
“What’s the bottom-line impact over a period of three years? While the program was in existence, we increased testing capacity in the country by about 8 billion tests and [there were] 56 emergency use authorizations during this time period. Most of these were for over-the-counter tests.”