Crowdfunding

Wrapping up Mountaintop Initiative

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With a little over a week left before the Ukweli team leaves for Sierra Leone, Mountaintop has entered the final stages of work. Sage and Naakesh have returned to Lehigh from Washington DC and Uganda, respectively, so our team now has four members working at Lehigh.

With a month gone by since the last update, a lot of progress has been made. Our crowdfunding campaign has wrapped up, and we would like to thank the nearly 40 donors who contributed almost $3,ooo to our campaign! We have begun submitting corporate grant applications in addition to our crowdfunding effort, and will hopefully bring in some more capital to help our venture fund operations for Ukweli in Sierra Leone.

With crowdfunding over, more attention will now be put towards concepts of operations and messaging. The team is wrapping up marketing and messaging strategies specific to different stakeholders in Sierra Leone (Community Health Workers, Mother Support Groups, Peripheral Health Units) in order to get the word out to pregnant women about the importance of getting screened. In addition, more work will be done on spreadsheets that will help Ukweli and partners on the ground keep track of inventory, purchases, and other data that would help Ukweli operate at a higher level.

Work has continued to be ongoing in regards to quality control testing of our strips, mainly towards the preeclampsia parameter. Basic light, humidity, and temperature tests have been conducted and finalized, and it is still determined that the preeclampsia assay holds up much better to harsher conditions than the UTI parameters on the strip. With the basic testing done, work has begun on compound exposure tests, which expose the strip to conditions for a shorter period of time over multiple trials. The goal of this testing is to see if multiple, short term exposures impact the quality and readings of the strips in the same way one, long term exposure does.

We are also proud to announce that two different papers by Ukweli have been accepted to the GHTC conference that will be held this fall in Seattle. One of the papers highlights the quality control measures that Ukweli has taken to ensure that our test strip will hold up against the more humid and hot conditions present in Sierra Leone, and also how these measures can be translated to other medical devices. Our other paper highlights the concepts of operations strategies Ukweli institutes in Sierra Leone to ensure the venture runs as smoothly and effectively as possible. Both papers have been accepted with revisions requested, so our team has been busy making edits to make sure the papers are in the best form they can be.

 

Testing the Strips and Raising Money

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These past few days of Mountaintop have been quality control focused for the team, as we were given access to our lab on Monday. Since gaining access to the lab, our team has conducted a few different light exposure tests, and completed one round of temperature exposure tests for the preeclampsia parameter on the test strip.

What we have found is that the preeclampsia parameter fares pretty well when exposed to light compared to the urinary tract infection parameters. We exposed test strips to a light that mimics sunlight for 45, 60, and 75 minutes. Even after 60 minutes, which is when the UTI parameters are impacted according to previous tests, the preeclampsia parameter remained in good condition and correctly identified urine with preeclampsia, as well as correctly identified urine that did not have the proteins that signify preeclampsia.

Light exposure test for preeclamptic urine: the green bottom parameter signifies a positive screening for preeclampsiaLight exposure test for clean urine: the yellow bottom parameter signifies a negative screening for preeclampsia

In addition to the light exposure tests, the test strips fared well with heat exposure. We kept strips in an incubator for 23, 24, and 25 hours at 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit), then tested to see if they would still give accurate readings with fake urine that had preeclampsia. We found that even after over a day of high temperature exposure, the strips were still able to give accurate readings for the preeclampsia parameter. More heat exposure testing will be done to determine if the preeclampsia parameter will give false positives after prolonged heat exposure, but the fact that it accurately read contaminated urine is a positive sign.

Heat exposure test for preeclamptic urine: the green bottom parameter signifies a positive screen for preeclampsia.

Aside from the lab testing, we have continued our crowdfunding efforts. Visuals about each team member and their roles were created, and will be put on the Ukweli website.

In addition, with this week of crowdfunding was focused on reaching out to local healthcare businesses about the possibility of donating to our venture. A script has been written out to be sent to local healthcare businesses such as Orasure, B Braun, and Sanofi, and our team has contacted Lehigh’s Office of Economic Engagement to get in touch with these companies.

Looking forward, next week will be focused on more lab testing and continuing the crowdfunding effort. With our egg incubator coming in, we will be able to conduct humidity exposure tests on our strips, and eventually combine different variables to test the strips quality (heat and humidity, etc). Next week of the crowdfunding plan is focused towards engaging Lehigh alumni in healthcare fields, so more scripts more specific to this group of potential investors will be written up and then sent out to the appropriate people.

 

Launching Mountaintop & Crowdfunding

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Mountaintop has gotten off to a good start for Zach and Rohan. With the Crowdfunding up and running, the first few days of work were dedicated to creating a short animated crowdfunding video clip showcasing ‘Amie’, a fictional women in Sierra Leone who is pregnant with her first child. This video highlights the overall problem of Urinary Tract Infections, Preeclampsia, and the maternal mortality rate in Sierra Leone, and was then paired with the filming our team conducted during the school year, which focused more on our product.

This video will shortly be up on our crowdfunding page!

Our crowdfunding focus continued, as we created visuals highlighting some of the main points of Sierra Leone’s healthcare issues and how Ukweli can help solve them.

These images, as well as a few others, were shared with all team members of Ukweli so they could post them on their social media pages to help spread the word about our venture and increase awareness about our crowdfunding effort. More visuals will likely be created so we can continue to spread the word of our crowdfunding to the public.

As for tangible work going with us to Sierra Leone, a new Ukweli poster that will be displayed in clinics was in the works.

Although our team brought posters highlighting UTIs to Sierra Leone last summer, the addition of preeclampsia to our test strip meant a new poster highlighting both UTIs and Preeclampsia was needed. A few more drafts will most likely be created to give the team more options to choose from.

Outside of the lab, we have worked on the IEEE quality control paper and have made steady progress. Several revisions have been done and the paper is beginning to come to fruition.

We have designed testing procedures for light, temperature and humidity in order to find the vulnerabilities of the preeclamptic assay. We have also designed procedures for testing the strip’s sensitivity to water ingress and dust/wind exposure. Testing has begun on the sensitivity of the stickers that were purchased to monitor exposure to environmental conditions.

With us recently gaining access to our own lab, it is looking like a lot of next week will be focused on the quality control testing of our test strips.