This week we continued making a workshop on Sickle Cell Disease for medical professionals in Sierra Leone. For now this meant that we worked on a slide deck and held a meeting with the team members who were traveling. In this meeting we reworked the order that the information was going to be presented in. Another upcoming event are Press Conferences and my team and I worked on that slide deck based on the feedback we received last week during a practice presentation.
On Tuesday afternoon, Professor Cheng and I met with the OraSure team to discuss our future plans for test strip optimization. Since the previous group of experiments was a success, we are ready to move forward. The first set of experiments done this summer were to make sure our bead conjugation protocol was effective and consistent. We did this using a far cheaper antibody to save money. We are now ready to move on to using the monoclonal anti-hemoglobin antibody that we plan on using when our assay is fully functional. For this we will repeat some of the experiments done with the cheap antibody, as some steps in the protocol may be slightly different between various antibodies.
The latter part of the week was spent largely at Mountaintop. We met with a group of high school students that were participating in an Entrepreneurship program at Lehigh. We spoke with them in great detail about all aspects of out project and about our thoughts on going to Lehigh. Following this we had an Innovator in Residence. He spoke about being a cultivator in a large company and slowly but surely making a change with great impact even without having a powerful position. Friday all the MTSE projects had Press Conferences. It seemed like our presentation and Q&A went well. Later that day our team had a meeting where we furthered our plans for fieldwork and beyond. One way our plans developed was by beginning to work on a video series on SCD that could be distributed via WhatsApp to healthcare workers or families who are in need. These could provide varying level of detail on important topics focused on the disease itself, its treatment, or diagnosis.