On Sept. 19, the West Coast Consortium for Technology & Innovation in Pediatrics, centered at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, presented its 2019 Symposium on “The Los Angeles MedTech Ecosystem: Spotlight on Pediatrics,” bringing together innovators, clinicians, entrepreneurs and engineers.

The symposium featured panelists, speakers and attendees from prominent organizations including Keck Medicine of USC, Cedars-Sinai, UCLA, the Lundquist Institute, IBM, Grid110, ScaleLA, the SBDC and the office of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.

The symposium also featured product demonstrations and an awards ceremony with check presentations for the winners of CTIP’s third Catalyzing Pediatric Grant competition, which bestows $250,000 in seed grants to accelerate projects specifically designed to improve the safety and delivery of care to infants and children. Seven innovators developing novel devices and technologies for pediatric patients were selected as winners this year and received $30,000-45,000 each. Applicants included device projects covering 18 different pediatric subspecialties from 20 states.

Grant winners included Hemex Health, which developed an affordable, accurate and compact testing platform for the millions of people who are at risk of malaria and sickle cell disease and lack access to viable diagnostics; MiniMagnamosis, which created tiny, specially shaped magnets that form a magnetic compression anastomosis to provide babies born with esophageal atresia with a continuous esophagus, allowing them to eat and drink on their own for the first time; and BrainChild Technologies, which is improving early identification of hearing loss in infants through a low-cost smart pacifier.

CTIP, a collaboration of CHLA and USC, accelerates the development of novel pediatric medical devices from concept to commercialization. Pediatric patients have long been an underserved population in the technology space with many having to deal with ill-fitted medical devices and a lack of access to effective diagnostic or therapeutic devices.

CHLA is located at 4650 Sunset Blvd. For information, visit westcoastctip.org.