Although my first week as a Mountaintop Fellow this summer was filled with paperwork and procedures, I am eager to get to the real work I have in mind. I am on the SicklED team, which is working to create a lateral flow diagnostic device for Sickle Cell Disease that is effective and affordable in lower income settings such as Sierra Leone. I have spent the last year and a half working on this project and this will be my second summer as a Mountaintop Fellow. and we have seemed to hit a spot in the lab where we are unable to produce consistently reliable results. This summer will be different.
These past two semesters my team has developed a partnership with OraSure Technologies Inc. and now I am a hybrid fellow-intern with Mountaintop and OraSure. My aspirations for the Mountaintop side are to help the other two fellows (who are relatively new to the team) become comfortable with leading the venture forward in its technology and plan for fieldwork. It can be a challenge to jump into a project that has been around for years and certainly to plan for fieldwork when so much is unknown. On the OraSure side of things I hope to learn everything my team will need going forward to troubleshoot and finish the development of our diagnostic test strip. It feels like we have been in the home stretch of development for over a year and just cannot produce the results we want. With our new partner, I believe we will now have access to the expertise we need to finally have a product that allows us to take the next steps as a venture.
However, this week I had to undergo the onboarding process with OraSure, which involved a lot of reading. Some of which were interesting, and some of which were detailed procedures to operate and clean machines that I had never seen before. However, I am nearing the end of my document-based training and should start more hands-on activities next week. Until then, I feel like I have a lot I want to learn this summer and only a few months to do so.
