Lab-in-a-Backpack goes to work in Ecuador

Rice University's Lab-in-a-Backpack has come to Ecuador in a big way.

The ultra-portable diagnostic laboratory, designed by students in the university's Rice 360˚: Institute for Global Health Technologies and Beyond Traditional Borders (BTB) initiative, is ready to be deployed. The Lab-in-a-Backpack will give villagers in the remote jungles and mountains of the South American nation better and faster access to modern health care.

Rice sent 24 diagnostic labs to Ecuador in the last week of 2009; FedEx donated their transport. Next week, five Rice 360˚ and BTB representatives will train 48 health care workers from across the nation in the capital city of Quito. Over the next 12 months, the backpacks will help provide care for an estimated 120,000 people.

The project was made possible through collaboration with Futuro Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes social, educational and medical programs for underserved Ecuadorian communities. Futuro used its ongoing work with clinics in remote areas of the country and secured the support of the Ecuador Ministry of Health to identify locations that will benefit most from the labs and the health care workers who will implement them.

The initiative is the boldest step yet in Rice's development of the lab, which began as a student project and has been sent for more limited trials to Ecuador, Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Malawi, Lesotho, Botswana, Swaziland and Myanmar. Nineteen students, faculty and staff members have worked on the pack’s design for more than three years.

The custom-designed backpacks equip clinicians with microscopes, centrifuges, pulse oximeters, otoscopes and other items one might need to diagnose an illness in the field. A custom-designed power-distribution box and solar cell ensure the equipment can be used anywhere, regardless of access to electricity.

Each year's trials have led to further refinements based on feedback from clinicians, technicians and nongovernmental organizations that have used the backpack to diagnose patients in the field.

"We are honored to help the Ministry of Health and the Futuro Foundation provide health care to poor communities throughout Ecuador," said Rebecca Richards-Kortum, chair and the Stanley C. Moore Professor of Bioengineering at Rice and founder of Rice 360˚. "The backpacks are the result of the ingenuity and hard work of Rice students, faculty and clinical partners over three years, and we are excited to undertake our first countrywide distribution of a student-designed technology."

The effort began when Futuro Foundation introduced BTB Director Yvette Mirabal to officials at the Ecuador Ministry of Public Health. The ministry asked for 1,000 labs for its EBAS (Equipos Básicos de Atención de Salud, or Basic Equipment for Integrated Health Care), which she described as half-ambulances, half-mobile clinics.

"They're in use throughout the country," said Mirabal, whose mother is Ecuadorian, "and the foundation thought the backpacks would be a perfect fit. When the emergency vehicles get as far as they can by road, doctors can carry the backpacks to where they're needed." She estimated 25 percent of Ecuadorians have very limited access to health care.

Mirabal will travel to Quito next week, along with Lauren Vestewig, executive director of Rice 360˚; Maria Oden, professor in the practice of engineering education and director of Rice's Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK); Anna Godwin, BTB program associate; and Rice alumnus Stephen Wallace ’08, who streamlined the design of the custom-built components of the backpack.

Without a manufacturing facility, it was impossible to make 1,000 backpacks. But students, staff and faculty used resources at the OEDK to design and assemble 24 labs -- one per federal district -- which have been donated to Ecuador with the provision that Rice 360˚ and BTB receive feedback over the year on their performance and the users' ability to restock such disposable elements as bandages, needles and other items essential to the lab's efficacy.

Having established a need for the lab, and with a very public pat on the back from former President Bill Clinton at his Clinton Global Initiative University in New Orleans in 2008, Rice 360˚ and BTB are seeking ways to supply more to help the world's poor.

"We have now generated enough interest that more and more people are coming to us," Oden said. "Our goals are to develop a business model that will get the diagnostic packs into the field … and to do this in a financially sustainable way."

 

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Related materials:

Follow the Rice team on the road to Ecuador on Twitter (http://twitter.com/rice360) and through Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/Rice360).  

You can read about Rice students' experiences bringing labs to Ecuador last summer through their blog at http://ecuador.blogs.rice.edu/.

High-resolution images are available at http://www.rice.edu/nationalmedia/images/backpack.jpg.

Media note: Maria Oden, director of Rice’s Oshman Design Kitchen, was on the ground last summer in Haiti working with Lab-in-a-Backpack. Oden is available to comment on the access to and quality of health care that was available to Haitians prior to yesterday’s destructive earthquake, and her thoughts on the current challenges that Haiti is facing in the aftermath of the disaster. To read the Rice University media alert on Haiti, visit www.rice.edu/nationalmedia/expert2010-01-13-haiti.shtml.