Product/Service Development

Muthupandian Ashokkumar at the University of Melbourne in Australia, along with Francesca Cavalieri, Meifang Zhou, and Srinvas Mettu, will produce edible microballoons made from protein that contain essential nutrients for adding to common foods to combat malnutrition in mothers and infants. Encapsulating the nutrients, rather than adding them directly to food, helps keep them stable and promotes their absorption in the body. It can also mask unpleasant tastes, and control the timing and location of nutrient release, which can increase their performance.

Joachim Loo of Nanyang Technical University in Singapore will develop techniques to encapsulate micronutrients such as iron for food fortification using okara, which is a nutritionally-rich pulp that is made as a wasted by-product during the production of soybean products. Micronutrient malnutrition affects two billion people globally. Providing micronutrients in the diet is difficult because they are unstable by themselves, and so need some form of protection, for example by encapsulating them in a stable, digestible material.

Lyndon Paul of Vissot Co Ltd in Cambodia will reduce production costs for their nutritional wafer biscuits, which are made from a micronutrient-fortified fish powder, to help treat severe acute malnutrition in children and prevent malnutrition in young children and pregnant women in Cambodia. Acute and chronic malnutrition are a major public health concern in Cambodia. They previously developed a fortified fish powder and showed that it could replace milk in food for infants and was effective at reducing malnutrition.

Lorraine Weatherspoon of Michigan State University in the U.S. will develop a blended instant bean sauce in an edible pouch that provides a culturally-acceptable iron and folic acid supplement for low-income pregnant women in Uganda. Iron and folic acid are particularly important during pregnancy as they reduce the risk of low birth weight and neural tube defects amongst many other morbidities and mortalities also for the mothers. Supplements provided as tablets are available, but have not been widely accepted.

Matthew Edmundson of Violet Health in the U.S. will develop iron-rich biscuits and tailor marketing campaigns to combat iron deficiency in adolescent girls in India. Iron deficiency is a global health concern and is particularly dangerous during pregnancy when it can increase the risk of maternal death and health problems for the infant. Nearly half of all adolescent girls in India are iron-deficient, and although iron tablets are available they are not taken properly, partly due to their bad taste and a cultural aversion to tablets.

Abhijit Das of Arogya Medtech Pvt. Ltd. in India will develop a device - CEREBROS - that is a modular unit combining electroencephalography (EEG) and near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) together with an Internet of Things (IoT) component incorporating a telemonitoring platform. This system enables continuous remote monitoring of cerebral hypoxia and seizures and early detection and management of hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) at point-of-care. The device is in the form of a wearable cap for neonates.

Taslimarif Saiyed from Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) in India will develop microfluidics-based pH sensors for antimicrobial resistance (AMR) detection. AMR is big healthcare challenge worldwide and particularly in India. Susceptibility assays are vital to study the emergence of new AMR strains in a community or geography, especially during epidemics. The proposed system - Rapid Personalized Antibiotic Susceptibility Assay (r-PASA) - is a DNA-based assay with pH sensors on a microfluidics platform.

Balaji Teegala from BRUN Health Pvt. Ltd. in India will develop a Doppler stethoscope - Acousta - that acts both as a standard annular Y-shaped stethoscope and as a Doppler stethoscope. The problem in auscultating the fetal heart to identify birth asphyxia among other fetal morbidities is the difficulty, skill, and training needed while using a regular stethoscope. This is mitigated by active sensing systems like the fetal Doppler systems or cardiotocographs. However, these systems are burdensome to carry in addition to a stethoscope.

Pratap Mukhopadhyaya from Wobble Base Bioresearch Pvt. Ltd. in India will develop a glucometer to detect HIV RNA. The existing major methodologies for viral load quantitation require sophisticated infrastructure and reagents that generate high priced tests (>50 USD per test) that are often not feasible for use in resource limited settings. The new assay involves making an HIV cDNA-DNA-invertase complex, which is added to sucrose solution to generate glucose through hydrolysis by the invertase enzyme that is detected using the glucometer.

The study aims to develop an Early Childhood Development friendly index (ECD-FI) based on a core set of evidence-based nurturing care indicators to assess the factors contributing to enabling environments and promote ECD at the municipal level by monitoring and identifying opportunities to scale up ECD programs. The index will be created through machine learning and will run analytical models considering demographic information and risk factors at the municipal level. This disaggregated data is not available in Brazil.