HCL Technologies (HCL), a leading global technology company, today announced a collaboration with University of California, Berkeley to create a Health Technology Collaborative Laboratory (“CoLab”) housed in the Blum Center for Developing Economies on the university’s campus in Berkeley, California. The CoLab is being launched over the backdrop of the COVID-19 global pandemic created an urgent need for timely access to therapeutics and diagnostics with telemedicine and telesurgery are more important than ever. As a founding member of the CoLab, HCL is contributing $750,000 over the course of three years.
The CoLab’s multidisciplinary teams will work on health technology innovations to meet the challenges in a new age of healthcare. These activities will include rapid problem-solving, prototyping and testing of breakthrough healthcare technologies. This unique environment will bring together stakeholders in healthcare (patients, clinicians, regulators and insurers), the business community and investors to create and commercialize solutions from initial concept through the stages of prototyping, systems architecture and scalable distribution. Uniting global experts, technology and new approaches have proven key to addressing treatment and containment during the current pandemic and will be an important model for addressing future health challenges.
“As a responsible global technology leader, we are proud to contribute and support the creation of macro-scale solutions to healthcare issues for a better future for all,” said GH Rao, President, Engineering and R&D Services, HCL Technologies. “We’re honored to support UC Berkeley in this initiative, especially as the healthcare industry is undergoing tremendous transformation. As a founding member, HCL will have the opportunity to contribute to promising solutions and projects underway and looks forward to engaging the CoLab Ecosystem to develop new and unique health technology solutions for the future.”
“HCL’s commitment, combined with its vision for technology innovation and its global reach, will allow us to realize the goals of the CoLab quickly,” said Daniel Fletcher, Associate Director for Research of the Blum Center, Purnendu Chatterjee Chair of Bioengineering, and Director of the CoLab.
HCL continues to spearhead innovation and investments across the global health technology industry, and in recent times has provided significant contributions in the United States to the CDC Foundation, United Way, Gates Foundation and Feeding America to enable and advance healthcare solutions. HCL’s recent investments in multiple innovation and delivery centers in the US will further create jobs and bring focus to solving critical social, medical and economic challenges posed by the pandemic.
