Qualcomm Foundation Awards Scripps Health $3.75M for Digital Health

The Qualcomm Foundation has awarded a three-year, $3.75 million grant to San Diego’s Scripps Health and its Scripps Translational Science Institute (STSI) to help advance the development of diagnostic tests, wireless devices, sensors, and other digital health technologies.

In a statement today, the institute says the funding is intended to support the kind of clinical trials needed to validate innovative technologies. The statement quotes Scripps CEO Chris Van Gorder as saying, “The generous grant from the Qualcomm Foundation reinforces our efforts to translate innovative discoveries into transformative clinical therapies.”

In this respect, STSI appears to be taking on a crucial role in technology commercialization that was intended to be a key part of the mission at San Diego’s West Wireless Health Institute. The West Wireless Health Institute, established in 2009 with Scripps Health as a founding health care affiliate and Qualcomm as a founding sponsor, announced plans that same year to conduct a clinical trial of wireless heart monitoring technology developed by San Jose, CA-based Corventis.

Eric Topol, director of STSI and chief academic officer for Scripps Health, underscored the importance of validating new wireless health technologies in a 2009 interview with CNBC about the West Wireless Health Institute. Topol also was an instrumental figure in founding the West Wireless Health Institute, and he served as the board’s vice-chairman and chief innovation officer.

But the wireless health institute—now known simply as the West Health Institute—changed course, and a West spokeswoman confirmed today that Topol officially stepped down

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.