NEST360, an international alliance rooted at Rice University, has won the Global Health Technologies Coalition 2021 Innovating for Impact Partnership Award for its efforts to end preventable deaths among newborn babies in African hospitals.
NEST360 is developing a hospital care package called Newborn Essential Solutions and Technologies, which includes a comprehensive bundle of affordable, fit-for-purpose innovations to improve the care of small and sick newborns. NEST360’s international partnerships grew out of the Rice 360˚ Institute for Global Health.
“We are honored to receive this award, which recognizes the work we do with our alliance members, funders and partners to advance innovations to end preventable newborn deaths in African hospitals,” saidRice 360˚ Co-Director Maria Oden, a NEST360 co-principal investigator, director of Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen and a teaching professor of bioengineering at Rice. “No baby should die needlessly, and no parent should have to suffer the loss of a child because the intervention needed is not available. The NEST360 alliance remains dedicated to working with governments to drive sustainable solutions to overcome the barriers that stand in the way of quality newborn health care.”
Since its founding in 2017, NEST360 partners have collaborated with governments to implement services in 65 hospitals across four African countries, train 10,000 medical professionals and deliver more than 2,300 newborn technologies. NEST360 facilities support the delivery of 500,000 newborns and the specialized care of 90,000 small and sick newborns annually.
Born out of the labs at Rice, Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences and Malawi University of Science and Technology, NEST360 is comprised of experts from 15 leading organizations and supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Saving Lives at Birth Grand Challenge Program and others.
The Global Health Technologies Coalition is a 35-member nonprofit advocacy organization focusing on global health research and development for new tools and technologies. Now in their fifth year, the coalition’s Innovating for Impact Awards celebrate U.S. commitment to global health research and development and honor multisector partnerships and policymakers that are helping transform breakthrough scientific research into lifesaving technologies for unmet global health challenges.