Health Diagnostics

One of every 12 persons worldwide is living with viral hepatitis. Mongolia has the highest rate of viral hepatitis and liver cancer mortality in the world (The Lancet 2011; 377: 1139-1140). We aspire to advance the care for hepatitis in Mongolia by providing innovative point-of-care screening and implementing an SMS campaign to increase awareness.

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Rotavirus is the most common cause of severe diarrhea that annually kills 500,000 children under age five and hospitalizes millions more. India's Achira Labs is creating a fabric-based chip that, when integrated into disposable diapers, will help detect and signal the infectious virus quickly and safely. We will develop a fabric based immunoassay diagnostic chip for rapid, qualitative identification and detection of rotavirus that can be integrated into disposable diapers to ease the collection and detection of virus in watery stool samples.

Acute diarrhoeal disease is the second-leading cause of death in young children. Many researchers, including us at McMaster University and the Botswana-UPenn Partnership, have been working on developing better and faster ways to diagnose these infections, but the impact of these novel enteric diagnostics has not yet been formally measured. We will conduct a clinical trial in Botswana to determine how many young children's lives can be saved by the implementation of these new technologies.

The objective of this Botswana-based collaboration led by Dr. David Goldfarb was to design and evaluate a user-friendly flocked-swab specimen collection system for the identification of enteric infections. This would have immediate impact in much of the world where diarrheal disease remains deadly and for the large part undiagnosed. Using an inexpensive innovation in specimen collection, the team diagnosed previously unrecognized pathogens that had caused the severe diarrhoea of over one-third of children in a group of southern African hospitals.

Our project aims to develop a low-cost and portable hematology analyzer as a screening tool for several key global health diseases including parasitic infections (viral, bacterial, fungal, and helminths), micronutrient deficiency (Iron, Vitamin A, and Vitamin B12), and hemoglobinopathies (sickle cell, thalassemia, and G6PD).

The medical tool to be developed within the MicroScreen Project will help to improve the quality of life of the people, especially of mothers and young children and the therapy of critical ill patients in low-resource environments.

We aim to develop a diagnostic tool using molecular approaches, that can quickly and accurately identify children with SAM, who are susceptible to an increased risk of death from infection after apparent stabilization during treatment for SAM.

Conduct clinical research and distribute mobile diagnostic chips in Cambodia and Malawi to accelerate elimination of Malaria.

This project provides comprehensive diagnostic solution for most of the blindness causing eye disease in low- and middle-income countries through "EYELIKE" Platform that may be utilized by lower level health workers. The Platform is composed with three major parts: i) a portable and easy-to-use fundus camera with affordable price to be connected to smartphones, ii) Smartphone Application that corrects patient data while demonstrating the diagnostic result and the disease map, and iii) pattern recognition algorithm diagnosing various eye diseases from the fundus images.