the greatest irony in global health is
that the poorest countries carry the
largest disease burden it resides the
countries of a globe in proportion to
the subject of interest we see that
sub-saharan Africa is the worst-hit
regent by hiv/aids this is the most
devastating epidemic of our time we also
see that this region has the list
capability in terms of dealing with the
disease there are very few doctors and
quite frankly these countries do not
have the resources that are needed to
cope with such epidemics so what the
Western countries developed countries
have generously done is they have
proposed to provide free drugs to all
people in third world countries who
actually can't afford these medications
and this has already saved millions of
lives and it has prevented entire
economies from capsizing in sub-saharan
Africa but there is a fundamental
problem that is killing the efforts in
fighting this disease because if you
keep throwing drugs at people who don't
have diagnostic services you end up
creating a problem of drug resistance
this is already beginning to happen in
sub-saharan Africa the problem is is
that what begins are the as a tragedy in
the third world could easily become a
global problem and the last thing we
want to see is drug-resistant strains of
HIV popping up all over the world
because it will make treatment more
expensive and it could also restore the
pre error of the carnage of hiv/aids I
experienced this firsthand as a high
school student in Uganda this was in the
90s during the peak of the HIV epidemic
before there were any error of his in
sub-saharan Africa and during that time
I actually lost more relatives as well
as the teachers who taught me to
hiv/aids so this became one of the
driving passions of my life to help find
real solutions that could address these
kinds of problems we all know about the
miracle of miniaturization but in the
days computers used to fill this entire
room
and people actually used to work inside
the computers but what electronic
neutralization has done is that it has
allowed people to shrink technology into
a cell phone and I'm sure everyone here
enjoys cell phones that can actually be
used in the remote areas of the world in
the third world countries the good news
is that the same technology that allowed
miniaturization of electronics is now
allowing us to miniaturize biological
laboratories so right now we can
actually miniaturize biological and
chemistry laboratories onto microfluidic
chips I was very lucky to come to the
u.s. right after high school and was
able to walk on this technology and
develop some devices this is a
microfluidic chip that I developed a
close look at how the technology works
these are channels that are about the
size of a human hair so you have
integrated valves pumps mixers and
injectors so you can fit entire
diagnostic experiments on to a
microfluidic system so what I plan to do
with this technology is to actually take
the current state of the technology and
build an HIV kit in a microfluidic
system so with one microfluidic chip
which is the size of an iphone you can
actually diagnose 100 patients at the
same time for each patient's we will be
able to do up to a hundred different
viral loads per patient and this is only
done in four hours 50 times faster than
the current state of the art at a course
that will be five to five hundred times
cheaper than the current options so this
will allow us to create personalized
medicines in the third world at a cost
that is actually achievable and make the
world a safer place by invite your
interest as well as your involvement in
driving this vision to a point of
practical reality thank you very much
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