The first clinical study of a low-cost, hand-held jaundice detector invented by Rice University students couldn’t have come at a better time for NEST360°, an international team of scientists, doctors and global health experts preparing for a Dec. 11 competition for $100 million from the MacArthur Foundation. The money would allow the team to carry out its visionary plan to halve the number of newborn deaths in African hospitals within 10 years.
The first clinical study of a low-cost, hand-held jaundice detector invented by Rice University students couldn’t have come at a better time for NEST360°, an international team of scientists, doctors and global health experts preparing for a Dec. 11 competition for $100 million from the MacArthur Foundation. The money would allow the team to carry out its visionary plan to halve the number of newborn deaths in African hospitals within 10 years.
“As the clinical study of BiliSpec shows, saving newborn lives in sub-Saharan Africa is achievable,” said NEST360°’s Rebecca Richards-Kortum, a Rice bioengineering professor and study co-author who has worked for more than a decade to bring effective, affordable neonatal technologies like BiliSpec to Africa. “It simply requires the right tools in the right hands at the right time.”
The clinical study, which is based on tests in February and March on 68 patients at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi, will appear this week in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Read more at Rice University
Image: BiliSpec is a low-cost, battery-powered reader designed to diagnose jaundice by immediately quantifying serum bilirubin levels from a small drop of whole blood. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)
