Hey! We’re high school students on a mission to improve the accessibility of diagnostics in global health through low-cost point of care screening systems.
Where we left off..
From our last newsletter, we chose to start fresh with new ideas. We embraced the freedom to look into a range of problems where we could apply biosensors. Some potential topics we explored were: post-operative anemia, panic attacks, iron deficiency anemia and vitamin A deficiency.
Ultimately, we landed on zinc deficiency because of its high prevalence in low resources areas, the lack of low-cost diagnostic tools, and simple treatment.
Ideas we explored but are moving past
Frequent monitoring of biomarkers to detect panic attacks:
Panic attacks are a common experience amongst teens, which was what immediately drew us to this topic. The ability to predict panic attacks, would allow then you could do breathing exercises and take medication to mitigate the effects beforehand. However, popular personal health trackers such as FitBit or Apple Watch can monitor your breathing and heart. If we designed a tracker with more accuracy via biomarkers, we would have to go under the skin. There is no financial incentive for a panic attack tracker, it would simply be a cherry on top.
Using biosensors to monitor recovering patients for post-operative anemia after surgery:
Post-operative anemia is already recognized as the large risk for patients who’ve undergone major surgery. Patients are heavily monitored after their procedure for any signs of iron deficiency, blood loss or lack of nutritional intake. In this case, testing for post-operative anemia after surgery is redundant. There is no financial incentive for an improved diagnostic tool when the equipment that is used at the hospital is sufficient. This was an approach that wasn’t super successful since we were thinking solution first before problem, so we quickly moved to the next area.
Individual diagnosis of zinc deficiency in children at community health centres
Annually, over half a million children die of zinc deficiency in low-resource areas. Local clinics in Sub-Saharan Africa often had no resources for diagnosis and you cannot treat what you don’t know. We immediately thought of designing a low cost biosensor for point of care diagnosis of zinc deficiency at these clinics. From there, individuals who were zinc deficient would be given supplementation.
However, we soon realized in places where deficiencies are incredibly high, it makes more sense to do a population analysis. These analysis can determine whether food fortification programs need to be implemented, and are capable of benefitting the area. This helped to clear up confusion as to why all the zinc organizations we talked to said they didn’t do individual screening before handing out supplements.
What we’re currently working on...
From there we started to look into the gaps in population based screening. We took a step back and started looking at food fortification programs that targeted micronutrient deficiencies, as they are the best way to treat micronutrient deficiency at a macroscopic scale. However after talking to some people from PATH, we learned that the efficiency of these programs are not being maximized and they’re not being implemented in the most needed regions because of the lack of census data. Fortification programs require mass amounts of data on the deficiency of a large population in order to be designed, however current data collection methods are incredibly costly (~$20 per sample) and are not capable of screening millions of people. From the people we’ve talked to and the paper we’ve read, this high cost is the number one barrier.
By designing a hand-held biosensor we would significantly reduce cost of quantifying concentrations of zinc in serum (~$200,000 to ~$200). This would be employable as door-to-door testing, since biosensors are mobile, can maintain the accuracy of a lab assay, and can produce results within minutes.
We’re currently getting validation from organizations that collect this data to see if this is a topic of high interest.
Our progress and growth
Failing Faster
We spent one month moving through different applications of biosensors and another looking both from the perspective of international and clinical health. For every problem we poked as many holes as possible, burning through dozens of ideas and ensuring we knew their low-impact/unfeasibility right from the start. If something caught our eye, we made sure to talk to experts to understand it more, like in the case of zinc deficiency.
Break the problem down
In poking the holes we had to make sure we were understanding the problems correctly. There were a lot of MURAL boards pulled up over the last month mapping out as many things as possible. And once we had attempted to break down the root causes of a problem, we talked to people to confirm that we were looking at the problem correctly (sometimes what you think may be a problem may not have been as big of a problem as you thought, or a problem at all!)
With zinc we had no idea it was split into population vs. individual based screening. We assumed that all disorders were individual based, but that wasn’t the case for micronutrients. And we didn’t know that there were a lack of population based surveys until we had actually talked to people from PATH, and that the root cause was high cost.
Advice, Resources and, Connecting
If you’d like to further discuss some of our topics or ideas, feel free to schedule a meeting with us or shoot us an email! Everything we mentioned is a more simplified version of the bigger picture. We would love to hear your thoughts.