Product/Service Development

Angela Koech Etyang of Aga Khan University in Kenya will make basic screening tests available to pregnant women at dispensaries and health centers that do not have laboratory facilities. These tests screen for conditions such as HIV, syphilis and anemia. They will employ simple existing technologies that enable these tests to be carried out during the clinic visit quickly, easily and by the nurse who is providing the care in pregnancy.

Dahabo Adi Galgallo of the Kenya Field Epidemology and Laboratory Training Programme (FELTP) in Kenya, will develop a waterproof, coin-sized, solar-powered GPS-tracking device that will be fitted into cultural jewelry of expectant mothers in pastoralist and nomadic communities so health workers can easily locate and provide them with pre- and antenatal care where they are.

Guilherme Vanoni Polanczyk from Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil will test their new method Pixel Averages for Auxological Assessment (PIXA3) that enables parents at home to frequently and precisely measure height during early childhood to help better detect and monitor growth defects in low-resource settings. The current standard for accurately measuring height requires specialized equipment and trained staff, and is thus unsuitable for frequent application.

Marcos Augusto Bastos Dias from Fiocruz in Brazil in collaboration with the Global Pregnancy Collaboration (CoLab) will test a new approach for managing women in Brazil with preeclampsia in order to reduce unnecessary preterm births. Preeclampsia is characterized by high blood pressure and impaired organ function during pregnancy and can cause severe complications or even death for mother and child. The only cure is delivery, but preterm births are also high risk.

Jose Simon Camelo Junior from the Universidade Federal de São Paulo in Brazil will test a method for producing a lyophilized human milk concentrate for feeding very low birth weight newborns that can be implemented in developing countries. Very small premature babies of less than 1,500 grams require large quantities of proteins, calories, minerals, micronutrients and electrolytes to survive and thrive. However, breast milk alone is not concentrated enough.

Jose Maria de Andrade Lopes of the Instituto Fernandes Figueira - Fiocruz in Brazil will conduct a randomized study to evaluate "Quarenta Semana," which is a program designed to remove risk factors associated with preterm births in Rio de Janeiro. The preterm birth rate in Brazil is amongst the highest globally. Some known risk factors for preterm birth include limited access to healthcare services, maternal social and health factors such as diabetes, and the quality of prenatal care.

David Wright of Vanderbilt University in the U.S. will develop a diagnostic that combines sample concentration and multiplex detection into one rapid test that can detect the low levels of the malaria parasite in asymptomatic patients. They will develop a vertical flow component to accommodate larger sample volumes, which will increase the sensitivity of the adjacent lateral flow assay. They will mark the position of a fold on the diagnostic for delivering the isolated biomarkers on one side to the lateral flow assay on the other, which will then present the results using colored lines.

Charlie Johnson of the University of Pennsylvania in the U.S. will develop a diagnostic platform that uses magnetic nanopore filters and a simple nucleic-acid detection system in an integrated miniaturized device to diagnose infectious diseases such as HIV from a variety of human samples. The diagnostic will consist of 15nm pores etched onto thin polycarbonate films that can trap individual viruses, label them with magnetic particles, and concentrate them with a magnetic field.

Alexander Green of Arizona State University in the U.S. and Keith Pardee of the University of Toronto in Canada will develop molecular technologies, hosted by cell-free systems embedded into paper, to create point-of-care diagnostics for multiple diseases at low-costs. These sensitive and specific diagnostics will remain active without refrigeration for one year, and have been demonstrated in proof-of-concept tests with the Zika virus.

Rebecca Traub of the University of Melbourne in Australia will develop a method to preserve fresh stool so that it can be transported over longer distances to central laboratories and used to diagnose intestinal parasites and monitor the different types. They will test two types of preservation, a 5% weight/volume potassium dichromate solution and 10% formalin, on the accuracy of identifying three different types of helminth eggs in fecal samples from infected individuals in Thailand over 120 days.