ECE Associate Professor Dr. Umer Hassan has received a HealthAdvance Grant Award on the project, “A Biomedical Test to Transform Clinical Care of Septic Patients in Emergency Settings of Hospital.” Dr. Hassan is the sole PI on the project. It’s a 2-year award with a total budget of $200,000 in direct costs.

Project is centered at developing a minimal viable prototype technology called Immuno-Dx^TM which will provide vital information about patients’ immune response to infections, and to fulfil unmet need for personalized diagnostics of septic patients in emergency department (ED) settings. Sepsis is the leading cause of death in the United States and worldwide in critical care settings with a 7.6% per hour decrease in survival rates the longer appropriate treatment is delayed. Current ED clinical triage process for sepsis suffers from low specificity, enabling not only delay in the appropriate treatment but also contributing to unnecessary/ non-specific resource allocation to the patients. Immuno-Dx^TM will incorporate patient-specific biomarkers and patients’ medical data to not only improve accuracy of sepsis diagnosis but also predict the clinical outcomes.

Project will be supported by HealthAdvance Fund^® that is the funding platform of Rutgers Optimizes Innovation (ROI) program established with an earlier grant received under the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Research Evaluation And Commercialization Hub (REACH). Fund is managed by Rutgers Innovation Ventures.

Congratulations to Umer!