Upon waking up and making our way to the main meeting room of the hotel, we were surprised to see several wooden statues, bracelets, and other purchasable souvenirs laid out on the table near the edge of the room. A local was eagerly selling the trinkets to us and the other students staying at the […]
Day 5: “Own It, Protect It, Care For It”
After breakfast, the team arrived and World Hope prepared for our meeting with the Vice Chancellor of the University of Makeni, Prof. Joseph Sesay, and Prof. Mehta. We made some final edits to our slide before driving off with Prof. Mehta and Prof. Joseph. Arriving at the Yoni campus at University of […]
Day 4: Filling in the Gaps
This morning we had plans to visit Holy Spirit Hospital with the Mothers of Sierra Leone team. Their P.I. has been very gracious in sharing his contacts with us and serving as our point of introduction. As his team set up their equipment, he led us to the matron’s office, where we, unfortunately, learned that […]
Day 3: More Hospital Interviews
After breakfast, we quickly made our way to World Hope since we were tagging along with the Mothers of Sierra Leone team to Gladys Koroma Memorial Hospital. It was a bumpy ride over, but thankfully everyone made it there in one piece. The hospital was in the middle of a small village, and many onlookers […]
Day 2: ABD Hospital and the Supermarket
This morning we met with Sulaiman, our translator, and we worked on recording and translating our course videos from English to Krio so that we can make them more accessible to the community. We also got the quiz questions translated and worked on updating the videos with our refined content. We will continue working to […]
Day 1: Arrival + Making Connections
After a long flight, we finally arrived in Freetown, Sierra Leone on August 6th at around 6 pm. Fortunately, all of our luggage was waiting for us when we arrived at the international airport in Freetown. After a short time spent gathering our belongings and finding Khanjan and Kelley outside, we piled onto the bus […]
Week 6: Further Developments
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 […]
Week 5: More Conjugation Experiments and Fieldwork
Dialysis We’ve had a number of experiments planned for the summer, all focused on optimizing specific aspects of our device. Part of this batch of experiments was implementing a less taxing/time consuming procedure for the dialysis of our antibodies. We’ve found a suitable alternative in column purification of our antibodies instead. It takes a fraction […]
Week 4: Conquering Challenges – Bead Conjugation Success, Device Standardization, and IRB Progress
OraSure Experiments On Wednesday, we were able to perform the first bead conjugation of the summer. To recap, bead conjugation is the process by which we attach, or conjugate, our color indicator “beads” to our secondary antibody. This process is complex and likely the main source of failures for the project. In order to effectively […]
Week 3: Buffer Production and Conjugation Experiments at OraSure”
Buffer Making and Void Volume Test Over the course of the week, we made more of three of our buffers, MES buffer, Conjugate Release Buffer (CRB), and running buffer. In addition to this, we conducted a void volume experiment with individual strip components, similar to the experiment we conducted last week. Essentially, we dipped the […]