This week we focused on the creation of the workshop we plan to hold at healthcare oriented schools in Sierra Leone in August. The workshop gives a relatively in depth overview of sickle cell disease, going over topics like symptoms, treatment and diagnosis. We met with some of the other team members going to fieldwork via zoom to iron out the details with this, where we reordered the slideshow that accompanies the workshop.
We’ve also been continuously following up with OraSure. On Tuesday, one of the team members and our PI met up with some of the OraSure staff in order to go over future steps for test strip optimization. The previous experiments we had conducted all used a generalized gamma globulin antibody as it was a cheap alternative to our more specific antibodies that we could safely use for trial and error experiments. Now that we have a better handle on our conjugation protocol, we will be conducting some of the same experiments on our specific, monoclonal, anti-hemoglobin antibodies. This is the antibody that will be striped on the device when it is fully functional. We hope the results are just as promising as they were with the cheaper gamma globulin antibody.
Last week we mentioned that we conducted an experiment to test whether washing our conjugated beads with PBS 3 times was necessary. Upon visual inspection, the results looked just about the same, so particle analysis was needed to make a definitive statement. This week, we received the data from the particle analysis of the beads. The results of the particle analysis are intended to show which of the bead vials had better homogeneity, however, they were somewhat inconclusive. We learned that particle analysis is typically best done right after conjugation, and that waiting too long can skew results. Because of this, we cannot make a definitive statement on whether the PBS washes helped.
In addition to all of this, A good portion of our week was spent up at Mountaintop. On Thursday July 13th, we met with a group of high schoolers staying at Lehigh for a global entrepreneurship program. We gave them an in depth overview of our project, and answered any questions that popped up. We also answered any questions they had about Lehigh as a school. After this, we had a meeting with Steven Suffian, a senior software engineer at a startup working on decarbonization. Prior to joining his current company, he researched food value chains in Kenya and worked with the local population to create income generating jobs for health workers there as well. Suffian has ample experience working with communities to foster sustainable impact, and this meeting was a great way for us to bounce ideas for the implementation of our product off of him,