Health Diagnostics

ChipCare Corporation's mission is to unlock global health equity through point-of-care innovation. Our low-cost, handheld extremely mobile and rapid blood testing device will increase life-saving clinical decision making at the community level in poor or remote settings. By 2015, UN plans to have trained one million community health workers in Africa. Our goal is to have our device into the hands of every one of these community health workers.

Amadou Alpha Sall of Institut Pasteur de Dakar in Senegal will add quantum dots to liquid patient samples for better tracking of results and to store diverse types of information relevant for diagnostics and research that can be retrieved in real-time. They will tag samples using stable semiconductor quantum dots to generate unique signatures that can be read by a mobile-based, lens-free, fluorescence microscope.

Jeroen Lammertyn, Jaroslav Belotserkovsky, and Michael Kraft of KU Leuven in Belgium will develop a low-cost device to simplify blood collection and processing for monitoring of HIV viral load in low-resource settings. Most diagnostic assays work on blood, which must be manually collected from the patient, and then processed and stored before analysis. This requires trained health workers and infrastructure, is time-consuming, and can be unsafe. They will develop a simple, integrated device to collect and process blood.

Owens Wiwa of the Clinton Health Access Initiative in Nigeria will develop an efficient and reliable system for tracking diagnostic samples and delivering results to improve the efficiency of HIV diagnosis and treatment of newborns in Nigeria. Over 3.5 million people in Nigeria are estimated to be living with HIV, and every year up to 40,000 newborns become infected. Many HIV-exposed infants are not properly diagnosed or monitored, leading to delays in treatment and worsening of the disease.

This innovation proposes to develop and field test a process for a contextually appropriate and innovative model for hypertension detection, treatment and control that will be rigorously evaluated, and can be scaled up into national programmes and integrated into the healthcare systems of Colombia and Malaysia.

Development of portable instrument for low income group countries which will be cost effective, time effective and highly efficient.

Current methods of detecting TB remain inadequate for low-resource settings. Our idea is to develop new technology for detecting TB via direct liquid microculture that is cheap, easy to use, and able to assess resistance to many drugs at once.

For more information visit: www.nimt.or.th

Many major global health threats (malaria, tuberculosis, parasitic infections but also cancer and nutritional issues) require quality diagnostic tests for both clinical and public health purposes; however, such tests are not available in resource-constrained settings. These innovators have developed a mobile phone microscope capable of facilitating diagnostic testing in rural, remote and resource-constrained environments.