Every second four babies are born across the world, totaling about 130 million births per year. Unfortunately, complications cause 6.3 million maternal and perinatal deaths per year, with the vast majority of those deaths occurring in developing countries—deaths that in many cases could have been prevented with basic interventions. But in some countries, up to half of expectant mothers do not have access to healthcare during their pregnancies.
This team of biomedical engineers is working closely with Jhpiego, the leading NGO in maternal and child healthcare, to develop an antenatal screening kit to deliver low-cost healthcare to women in even the remotest villages. The kit includes a variety of custom markers pre-filled with reagents for screening tests. The tests are intuitive and simple to use, allowing a semi-trained community health worker to mark a piece of paper and create a custom dipstick for the mother. The kit contains seven tests for conditions including pre-eclampsia, gestational diabetes, malnutrition, and anemia. The team is pilot testing the kit in Nepal.
At the Rice conference in Houston, the JHU-CBID student team of Maxim Budyansky, Shishira Nagesh, Sean Monagle, Mary O’Grady, James Waring, Sherri Hall, Matthew Means and Peter Truskey brought home the Social Venture and the NCIIA Venture Labs awards, which are worth about $28,000 in cash and prizes. This is the third prize-winning achievement for CBID students under the mentorship of Dr. Harshad Sanghvi, Jhpiego’s Vice President and Medical Director and the originator of the global health challenge, and Dr. Soumyadipta Acharya, director of the CBID graduate student program and an Assistant Research Professor at the Whiting School of Engineering.
Publicly available: no
Countries where available: Nepal