THE START OF IT ALL
SicklED began as a capstone research project in 2018, eventually being adopted by Khanjan Mehta as a Lehigh University Global Social Impact Fellowship (GSIF) venture in 2019. Every year, a new cohort of GSIF students collaborates with the senior members of the team to advance the venture forward. Explore this page to gain an understanding of what SicklED is (and becoming!)
Initially, the team was focused on designing a lateral flow device similar to pregnancy tests, exemplified by the straight test strip design in 2018. However, the biggest challenge in translating this technology to meet our needs was that the concentration of hemoglobin in blood is very high, whereas the target molecule indicating pregnancy is present in very low concentrations. Additionally, we wanted to make our device unique and decided to test various device geometries to establish a design that is distinguishable and functions with high hemoglobin concentrations; to this effect, we expanded our research to a T-junction in 2019 and later to an E-junction test strip. Explore the pages using the drop-down menu of this section to learn more about our device and how it works.