Infectious Disease

Some five to 10 per cent of African children with a serious infection die in hospital. Alarmingly, an even higher percentage of children die in the weeks after their discharge. Doctors and parents are often unaware of this period of high vulnerability and are poorly equipped to identify or handle recurrent illness. A mobile phone application developed by this project for hospital use will help to identify at-risk children who need referral to a community health worker, while parents will receive a discharge kit to help guide care for their recovering child.

Misdiagnosis of diseases due to the lack of microscopical examination capacity has taken its toll: high mortality rates, drug resistance, economic burden and distrust in local medical practitioners. While microscopes are available to most clinics, there is a lack of trained lab technicians who can process the images. Leveraging recent advances in mobile phone camera-based microscopy, automated lab testing to be carried out with existing microscopes and ubiquitous smartphones would be available.

New infectious diseases are emerging faster than ever, while many previously controlled diseases are re-emerging. BioDiaspora is a real-time decision support tool for managing the risk of infectious diseases, integrating and synthesizing big data about location and context.  This advanced predictive analytics tool will be introduced to India.  For more information visit www.biodiaspora.com.

By engineering bacteria, this project aims to produce natural, low-cost drugs for the developing world.  The prototype objective: an antibiotic called violacein, which may help treat diseases such as leishmaniasis and malaria, but stalled in clinical development due to its high cost.

To develop a cost-effective remote diagnostic device that performs automated microscopy & colorimetry-based biochemical tests, requiring limited operating skills, making diagnostics affordable & accessible to 90% of rural patients within 3-5km reach lower middle income.

Drug-resistant microorganisms are a major contributor to the global burden of disease. Timely monitoring is the first line of defense to control their proliferation. We are developing a rapid, low-cost pathogen detection system for initial deployment in under-resourced settings in India to help drastically reduce the spread of disease. Follow Institute for Optical Sciences on Twitter @iosuoft"

Developing countries afford to have haematology analyzers in a handful of large hospitals. The project will develop low-cost devices for blood cell count and white blood cell differentials to enable wide availability of routine blood testing to large populations.

The need for rapid, sensitive and reliable pathogen detection is key for safe and effective treatment against infectious diseases. We propose to develop a highly sensitive, low-cost, hand-held electricity-free device for rapid infectious pathogen detection in various samples, which can be easily operated in under-resourced settings.

Quimin You of Ustar Biotechnologies (Hangzhou) Ltd. in China will develop affordable, rapid, and simple nucleic acid extraction devices and an affordable, rapid and simple isothermal nucleic acid amplification assay that can be performed at the village level by minimally trained personnel.

Nguyen Trung and Nguyen Van Kinh of the National Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Vietnam will develop a patient­to­chip microfluidics component for the collection and processing of whole blood into plasma and cells for downstream testing to target highly prevalent tropical diseases.