Jaundice project wins Duke contest

Low-cost devices help heal infants

Thousands of infants in developing countries may get treatment for jaundice, a common and potentially devastating newborn condition, because of a Duke University graduate student's prize-winning project.

By September, a Durham company should start turning out low-cost medical devices -- special lights that clear infant jaundice -- based on a model developed by Vijay Anand, who graduated last month from Duke's Pratt School of Engineering with a master's degree in engineering management.

Exposing infants to bright light is not a new concept in the treatment of jaundice, a condition that develops in newborns when their livers can't filter a waste product called bilirubin from the blood. Light converts bilirubin into a less toxic substance.

But standard lights cost up to $4,000 apiece, and hospitals in impoverished countries typically can't afford to buy them. As a result, thousands of babies never get treatment and go on to suffer serious consequences such as brain damage, deafness or even death. Sunlight alone can't cure jaundice.

Anand's light units will cost about $500. His business plan to distribute them took the top prize in CUREs, a new Duke-sponsored business-plan contest that challenges competitors to come up with affordable medical devices to solve pressing unmet needs in the developing world.

The contest is an offshoot of Engineering World Health, a Duke program that dispatches engineering students and other skilled volunteers to poor hospitals around the world. The program donates refurbished medical equipment, then has engineers train hospital staff to use the equipment and do simple repairs.

This summer more than 30 Duke students are volunteering in Third World hospitals, doing repairs and interviewing hospital staff about their needs. The students' field work will help identify medical needs that next year's CUREs competitors can tackle.

Winning the CUREs contest netted Anand $100,000 in seed money to establish a nonprofit company, PhotoGenesis, that will commercialize and distribute the lights.

Anand has been humbled by the enthusiastic response to his winning entry. Since the contest, he has received e-mail messages from people who work in service organizations telling him that the light will save millions of lives.

Anand said he is surprised that some minor innovations on his part -- his GINI 300 light is based on the same technology used in standard lights -- produced such meaningful results. He said the real challenges were squeezing as much cost out of the design as possible, and in coming up with a workable plan to get the devices to hospitals that need them.

The model light developed by Anand's team, which included three Duke undergraduates who earned course credit for their biomedical engineering work, used light-emitting diodes or LEDS instead of light bulbs or tubes, which are more costly and prone to breakage. The frame of the device was a trapezoid, to focus the light more intensely, allowing fewer LEDs to be used. The wood and metal model cost only about $300 to build.

"It's tragic no one did this before," said Anand, who is splitting his time between a full-time day job as a software developer and working on sales and marketing of the new lights. "The technology isn't new, and it's already on the market. The hard part is getting it to the people who need it."

Tackle Design, a Durham industrial design firm, volunteered to come up with a version of the light suitable for large-scale production and distribution. Chuck Messer, an industrial designer with Tackle who helped judge the CUREs competition, offered to help with a redesign after PhotoGenesis won.

"It was too good a problem to pass up," Messer said.