People’s Choice Award Win at 2011 NCIIA Open Minds Conference
On March 24-26, CBID’s MSE Team presented the Antenatal Screening Kit at the National Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance (NCIIA) annual Open Minds conference . The Antenatal Screening Kit was selected along with 14 other of the NCIIA’s best teams, to showcase their inventions. During the evening reception at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington D.C, students set up posters and live demos, and they pitched their ideas to all the guests. The audience included a rich mix of university professors, investors, and entrepreneurs. The guests voted for the best student team by depositing fake money termed “investment dollars” to the team they thought had the best investment potential. The Antenatal Screening Kit team worked hard, and came out winning the highest award the “People’s Choice Award” with a cash prize of $500.
The Antenatal Screening Kit, in collaboration with leading NGO Jhpiego ,is developing an extremely low cost platform technology for screening pregnant women for high risk conditions. Currently, 1,000 women die each day from pregnancy related complications that could be prevented if detected early. However, many women in developing nations never receive screening because it is simply too expensive. The Antenatal Screening Kit delivers screening tests for conditions such as malnutrition, gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, urinary tract infections, anemia, and newborn jaundice at a fraction of a penny.
The team has developed a pen platform to create a screening test. Each pen contains chemicals that were specially formulated to detect an abnormality in the urine or blood. The community health care worker would then use this pen on standard filter paper to make a test for the mother. With the change of color, the community health care worker would be able to tell a woman that she needs to go and seek more care.
The team is mentored by Dr. Harshad Sanghvi, Vice President & Medical Director, Jhpiego, and Dr. Soumya Acharya, Graduate Program Director, CBID.