The IDea Incubator competition encourages innovators and early-stage ventures with original inventions, products and ideas that have the potential to improve infectious diseases care to share their ideas with the ID community. Finalists are invited to present to the ID community in a pitch competition and receive feedback from a panel of judges and experts in medicine, technology and business during IDWeek. Winners are awarded up to $10,000 in funding.
Applications will be accepted through Aug. 4. Applicants and finalists will be notified the week of Aug. 22, and final winners will be honored at the live pitch competition during IDWeek in Washington, D.C. To apply or learn more about competition rules, please visit www.idsafoundation.org/ideaincubator.
“The burden of infectious diseases has been made ever-more apparent through the last years of the pandemic,” said Javeed Siddiqui, MD, MPH, founder and chief medical officer of TeleMed2U. “We are proud to recognize and nurture innovators who are making groundbreaking strides to combat all infectious diseases and improve patient care.”
Dr. Siddiqui launched the first IDea Incubator at IDWeek in 2018. Since then, the competition has awarded nearly $70,000 in funding.
Grand prize winners of the 2021 IDea Incubator competition were Sanjay Jain, MD, Filipa Mota, PhD, and Alvaro Ordonez, MD, of Johns Hopkins University for their innovation, Molecular Imaging of Bacterial Infections. The team developed F-FDS, a patent-pending, bacteria-specific PET imaging technology that differentiates gram-negative bacterial infections from other diseases, such as cancer metastases and tumors. Unlike more traditional approaches for diagnosing infections, F-FDS does not require surgery or biopsy, it has nearly 100% specificity, and it can detect infections anywhere in the body with rapid results available within the same day.
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About IDSA Foundation
Founded in 2001, the IDSA Foundation is the charitable arm of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. The Foundation is committed to providing career development opportunities, supporting education and funding groundbreaking research in the field of infectious diseases. Through its work, the Foundation invests in the next generation of diverse ID leaders and promotes advancements in patient care. For more information, visit idsafoundation.org.
About IDWeek
IDWeek is the annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, the HIV Medicine Association, the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society and the Society of Infectious Diseases Pharmacists. IDWeek features the latest science and bench-to-bedside approaches in prevention, diagnosis, treatment and epidemiology of infectious diseases, including HIV, across the lifespan. IDWeek 2022 will take place Oct. 19-23 in Washington, D.C. For more information, visit www.idweek.org.