In what seemed to be no time at all, Mountaintop was coming to a close. After seven weeks of intense work, SicklED’s team was going to Sierra Leone this Saturday. On Monday, we ran the EDC/NHS conjugate release pads, one perfectly scaled down and one improvised. Success! We had two functional pads, one with dark, […]
Mountaintop 2025
Week 7: Lab, Lab, and More Lab!
This week would be the most intensive lab week the team has faced all summer. While it was not the busiest, the time spent in the lab was arguably more than the time I spent in bed. Monday morning, the team did a fresh conjugation, using one of the few “good” vials of beads. With […]
Week 6: Saratoga Blue
Week six of the Mountaintop program would prove to be, by far, the most busy week yet. As a team, we were stretched thin across all of the various projects we have been concurrently working on. Monday was the busiest of these days. At 9:00, the team met with Marta from PIH who gave great […]
Week 5: Dreams and Nightmares
A week of soul crushing results turned hopeful. A week of outtakes and bloopers. A week of more emails. This was week five. Monday morning started off with a fresh conjugation. New conjugate release pads ready for testing. In the afternoon, the pads were deployed to compare different sample sizes of 1mg/ml–perhaps the thicker sample […]
Week 4: The Abcam Scam
This week started off with the new arrival of our beads! Finally, with new materials in tow, we can continue our laboratory research on developing the test strip. After weeks of paperwork and digital writing, our team was itching to get back into the lab. Monday morning, we checked up on our old antibodies with […]
Week 3: A Calling from Salone
Heavily involved in the I-Corps program, our team was preparing for interviews. After reaching out to Mr. Sankoh of SHAFS, we had a string of interviews arranged to push us towards our goal of 20. Starting at 8 AM, we set up our Zoom link and began interviews with the staff of SHAFS. We had […]
Week 2: A Microscopic Movie
What does blood lysis look like under a high-powered microscope? Has our lysis procedure been effective in releasing hemoglobin? While our materials are shipping, we decided to do some visualizing of our lysis procedure. Using our newly obtained BSL2 training, we accessed the large microscope in HST. With some short training from Professor Cheng’s PhD. […]
Week 1: Mountaintop Pilot
This week kicked off the Mountain Top Summer Experience program where SicklED is looking to make major leaps in device development and fieldwork preparation. To start the week, we had orientation where each team laid out plans and goals for this summer. Afterwards, we regrouped in HST where we began to lay out a complete […]