Student innovation in low cost diagnostics

2 Comments Published by naman April 6th, 2009 in Diagnosis

My brother is amazing. For his senior design project as a biomedical engineer, he is developing an inexpensive platform for the diagnosis of infectious diseases (covered by the News & Observer). Pavak sought out technical and business development experts, put together a great team of students, and spent countless hours building an imaging cytometer – a device which can count cells in an automated fashion. By labeling cells of interest with a specific dye, its possible to detect and measure the presence of a specific organism. They are starting with an assay to detect tuberculosis, but the next step may be a malaria test. To be fair, the technology isn’t appropriate for all situations and there are many hurdles before the idea can even make it to the field. But for a group of undergraduate students its a tour de force demonstrating initiative, creativity, and engineering ability.

An addendum: how do we create the right environments to encourage and support students to take such risks?