PACK POINTS
Fighting TB as easy as 1-2-3
Tuberculosis is one of the world’s most intractable medical problems, spreading at the alarming rate of one new infection every four seconds. It has now infected up to one-third of the people on Earth, primarily in the developing world, where diagnostic and treatment tools are scarce.
And it’s an effective killer, claiming 1.7 million lives each year.
But those numbers may change thanks to the pioneering work of three NC State undergraduates who have developed the first practical diagnostic device for TB that is cheap, fast and accurate.
“Here’s the simple explanation,” said Daniel Jeck, a biomedical engineering student. “You take a patient’s saliva and put it on a slide. Then you place the slide in our device. If it glows green, then the patient has an active case of TB. Diagnosing tuberculosis is now as easy as counting glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling.”
The explanation might sound simple, but it had stumped professional medical device developers for years. To build the device, Jeck teamed up with two other students in the university’s Engineering Entrepreneurs Program: biomedical engineering major Pavak Shah and Hersh Tapadia, an electrical and computer engineering major.
The device has the potential to save thousands of lives and millions of dollars in the developing world, where up to 40 percent of all active TB cases are missed by clinics and hospitals using traditional diagnostic tools. One of the major benefits of the device is that, unlike the traditional diagnostic tools, it can be used by anyone who can use a computer, not just a trained professional.
The students are still investigating options for the distribution of their device, which they estimate could be mass-produced for under $500 each.
“We decided that we had to create something so that you could push
a button and read the test results,” Tapadia said. “It had to
be that simple.” 