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Bioengineering for global health

Nature Reviews Bioengineering volume 1, pages 10–12 (2023)Cite this article

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Bioengineering has the power to improve health globally by engineering diagnostic, treatment and disease monitoring platforms that function in diverse settings, including resource-constrained contexts. In this Viewpoint, the authors highlight the pressing challenges that need to be addressed to make the field more equitable and to enable bioengineered solutions that can be implemented anywhere, anytime and by anyone.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Engineering, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

    Audrey K. Bowden

  2. London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK

    Noah Fongwen

  3. Nature Africa, Lagos, Nigeria

    Akinlabi K. Jimoh

Authors
  1. Audrey K. Bowden
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  2. Noah Fongwen
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  3. Akinlabi K. Jimoh
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Contributions

Audrey K Bowden is the Dorothy J. Wingfield Phillips Chancellor Faculty Fellow, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Vanderbilt University. Her research interests include biomedical optics (particularly optical coherence tomography and near-infrared spectroscopy), microfluidics and point-of-care diagnostics.

Noah Fongwen is a global health expert with more than 10 years of experience in implementation science and health policy research in both high- and low-income settings. He is a fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and lead for diagnostics access at the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

Akinlabi K Jimoh is a leader in promoting science and public health in his native Nigeria and across the African continent. He is the Chief Editor of Nature Africa and an anglophone coordinator (2009–2013) for the World Federation of Science Journalists (WFSJ), Science Journalism Cooperation project (SjCOOP). A Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT (1999/2000) and Bell Fellow in Population and Development Studies at Harvard School of Public Health (1995/1996), he founded the Development Communications (DevComs) Network, a media development organization in science and public health journalism based in Lagos.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Audrey K. Bowden, Noah Fongwen or Akinlabi K. Jimoh.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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Related links

Onesimus: https://www.history.com/news/smallpox-vaccine-onesimus-slave-cotton-mather

Strong interlinkages between countries of the global North and South in scientific publishing: https://harvardpublichealth.org/breakthroughs-ahead-from-african-labs/

This would eventually ensure the development of key capacity in the global South and a win for all, including the field of bioengineering: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/12/3-scenarios-for-how-bioengineering-could-change-our-world-in-10-years/

World Association of Medical Editors (WAME): https://wame.org/page3.php?id=81

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Bowden, A.K., Fongwen, N. & Jimoh, A.K. Bioengineering for global health. Nat Rev Bioeng 1, 10–12 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44222-022-00009-1

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