Rebecca Richards-Kortum
On Friday Boston University had the privilege of hosting Rebecca Richards-Kortum, director of the Rice 360 Institute for Global Health and a leader in bioengineering for global health. Dr. Richards-Kortum gave a presentation on her work, discussing her point of care screening devices for cervical, esophageal, and oral cancer and the CPAP device for neonates that started as a student senior design project and is now being disseminated across hospitals in Malawi. She also discussed her work with rapid anemia diagnostics. In Malawi, she found similar problems to what our team saw in Zanzibar. Hemocue machines were prevalent, but the cost of the micro-cuvettes for collecting blood was a burden. There was also a problem with laboratory hours, with many labs closed on nights and weekends. Her team began designing a rapid anemia test using chromatography and filter paper. While lab test results looked promising, field tests did not provide results with the desired level of accuracy. The team has since switched to nitrocellulose instead of chromatography paper. With the new design, 98% of results were accurate to 1 g/dL, and 100% were within 1.5 g/dL.
We were able to speak briefly with Dr. Richards-Kortum after the seminar, and the biggest piece of advice she had for our team was to find a good manufacturing partner, suggesting a smaller company with more flexibility and risk tolerance that would be able to provide faster product turnaround.
