There were two interesting global health technology stories on NPR’s All Things Considered today. The first story focuses on the Liter of Light project in the Philippines, in which a one-liter bottle of purified water diffracts sunlight and provides as much light as a 55-watt electric bulb. The second story is the second in NPR’s series of young innovators, which highlights the work of Marian Bechtel, who is working to detect landmines using sound. Listen to the story here.
December 28, 2011
November 7, 2010
Synthetic biology meets global health: iGEM Jamboree 2010
Synthetic biology, the emerging field of biology in which organisms’ genes are engineered to perform non-natural tasks, promises to revolutionize the future of medicine. iGEM is an undergraduate competition in which teams from universities all over the world compete to engineer the most amazing new functions using standardized genetic parts, called BioBricks. The rate at which these teams innovate is unbelievable. I am the advisor for the UBC iGEM team, and our project this year was to develop a way to break down Staphylococcus aureus biofilms by using engineered bacteriophage cloned directly into the genome of the host organisms to make a “suicide bomber” cell strain that would only go off and express the phage when it encountered quorum sensing signals indicating a Staph biofilm nearby. Amazing project, but others were even more amazing. This year, several teams latched onto critical global health problems and attacked them using synthetic biology. The University of Washington iGEM team invented two new antibiotics, one a broad-spectrum antibiotic-expressing strain of bacteria that would exist as sentinels in the body and only demonstrate antibiotic effects when they detect a Gram-negative pathogen. The other antibiotic was a modification of this system against a specific species of Gram-positive pathogens. Imperial College London invented a synthetic biology diagnostic for schistosoma parasites in water before they infect human hosts. They even developed a plastic diagnostics chamber with a clear window for the user to see the color change caused by the genetic expression of a yellow-colored product. The best part? Their system was designed to be low-cost and modular so that it could be modified to detect other parasites, including Chagas, leishmania, and more. Other teams developed systems to fight celiac disease, yeast cells that kill TB, and re-engineered the bacteria that live is mosquito guts to try and kill off malaria at the source. Remember these are teams of mostly undergraduate students. This is what I mean when I say that science will prevail over antibiotic resistance and other biomedical challenges. In all, there were 130 teams from 26 countries at this year’s iGEM competition, the Jamboree. An amazing job was done by all – see the 2010 iGEM website for more details or follow the #IGEM2010 hashtag for up-to-the-minute details. I am tweeting using the #iGEM hashtag, so you can follow those, too.
October 17, 2010
¡Viva Chile! ¡Viva la tecnología!
Having watched the last miner being brought up from the mine in Chile has helped renew my faith in the power of the human spirit and our ability to break down cultural barriers that so often keep us apart. This was a truly international effort and crisis: Chile, U.S., 2 Canadian companies, one Bolivian miner trapped. Yet, when it really counted, all these groups got together from different parts of the world and collectively solved a problem and saved 33 lives. I think this could be the Apollo 13 of my generation – the world transfixed, a happy outcome, and engineering played a major role. My question is this – how do we translate this sort of success to other situations? I just read about a mine explosion in China that killed 20 workers, and mining operations all over the world lose people every year. I think an important part of global health needs to be focused on occupational health and safety, and I know it is already, but this seems to renew the call for better systems to deal with this sort of industry before we get to the point where we have to drill through 2000 feet of rock. Can technology play a role in this process? How do we ensure safety through the use of new technologies and monitoring systems? Dangerous occupations all over the world could benefit from new or improved use of technologies like this: deep-ocean fishing, deep-water oil/gas drilling, and others. Part of the solution may lie in making existing monitoring technologies less costly, thus improving their spread throughout developed and developing industries. Could there be a system for subsidizing the use of these technologies, in a manner similar to vaccine introductions or HIV/AIDS medications? What about generics for heavy industries? A methane detection system from India that works as well as a methane detection system from the US is bound to cost less (at least in the near term).
October 6, 2010
Microfluidics for global health, Ch 2
In the last post, I began talking about microfluidics and how recent efforts are focused on applying this technology to global health diagnostics. This post is the conclusion of that one.
Other advances in microfluidics for global health have come in the form of new technologies for simplifying the methods used to fabricate microfluidic systems. Some of these advances are in materials and some are in methods. In the area of materials, the so-called Shrinky-Dink® microfluidics can be used to print a microfluidic chip pattern using a conventional printer on a special thermoplastic sheet; reheating the thermoplastic material then causes it to revert to its original size, reducing the ink patterns on the sheet as it does so. The resulting mould can be used to make microfluidic chips in minutes with very few materials and common equipment. Another advance comes in the use of Jell-O®, the popular gelatin dessert, to make microfluidic chips. This is work from Tony Yang, a student in my lab, and although the feature sizes in the final devices are larger than the usual 0.1mm, the flow is still laminar. These chips were designed for educational use, but I wonder if the use of other locally available biopolymers might make these sorts of chips useful for global health diagnostics.
The final advance comes in the form of Dean flow, a topic I have discussed previously on this blog. Using the nonlinear equations of fluid flow, it becomes possible to design microchannel geometries that focus particles by size without applying any forces other than those used to drive the flow. A simple pump could therefore be used to remove bacterial pathogens or protozoans from drinking water, to purify certain types of cells, or many other uses. I look forward to seeing where this technology base will take us in the future.
July 22, 2010
Engineering Design: Not a Black Art!
In reading through an article on the NY Times Health section recently, I came across an article talking about failure analysis. The article was using the Deep Horizon well as an example of the difficulty of engineering design. Part of the article included a quote from a former engineer about design:
Eric H. Brown, a British engineer who developed aircraft during World War II and afterward taught at Imperial College London, candidly described the predicament. In a 1967 book, he called structural engineering ‘the art of molding materials we do not really understand into shapes we cannot really analyze, so as to withstand forces we cannot really assess, in such a way that the public does not really suspect.’”
Is this really true? No.
What is engineering design if not the attempt to master these forces for predictable outcomes? Many, many buildings still stand – certainly there must be some predictability there. I would argue that our understanding of many materials, particularly those in use in 1967, has improved dramatically. I would, in fact, assert that a professional engineer should not look at his or her work this way. At least in British Columbia (and in Canada more generally), the professional engineer code of ethics holds pubic interest as the first major goal. It also includes points about not faking what you know and lifelong learning. Designing when you don’t have predictability about the outcome is not design, it’s doodling. You don’t need 100% confidence that the building won’t fall down, but you do need 100% confidence under anticipated typical operating conditions plus a margin of error. That’s what design is.
While failure analysis is a critically useful field in engineering, it follows the rules of physics just like all other fields of engineering. Good design is no different. Luckily, the tools we have at our disposal today make this job of predicting outcomes much easier. The failure of the Deep Horizon well was not a problem with design in general, it was a problem with the design.
