Frederick Balagadde: Bio-lab on a microchip

The greatest irony in global health

is that the poorest countries

carry the largest disease burden.

If we resize the countries of the globe

in proportion to the subject of interest,

we see that Sub-Saharan Africa

is the worst hit region by HIV/AIDS.

This is the most devastating epidemic of our time.

We also see that this region

has the least 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 out 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 that,

what begins 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-ARV 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 ARVs 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.

Back in the day, computers used to fill this entire room,

and people actually used to work inside the computers.

But what electronic miniaturization 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 US right after high school,

and was able to work 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

onto 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, we will be able to do

up to 100 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 cost that will be five to 500 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.

I invite your interest

as well as your involvement

in driving this vision

to a point of practical reality.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)