What were you doing at 18?
Probably not developing a test for an emerging worldwide Ebola outbreak.
Emory students Rostam Zafari and Brian Goldstone, both 18-year-old freshmen on the pre-med track, are working on such a test that they say will be cheaper and more user-friendly than existing Ebola tests.
Their test, named REDS, or Rapid Ebola Detection Strips, would be similar to a blood sugar test. A bit of saliva or a pinprick of blood would be placed on a detection strip and tested to determine whether the Ebola virus is present in the test subject. The simple test could be performed in the most remote villages of West Africa, where the current Ebola outbreak has wreaked the most damage, and led to more than 3,400 deaths, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The goal is for the strips to detect Ebola at the lowest viral level and during the incubation period, which can be three weeks long, Zafari said. If successful, Zafari and Goldstone estimate REDS kits would cost about $10, and between 25 and 50 tests could be performed with each kit.
The students view the project as a humanitarian effort, Zafari said. They have dedicated their work on REDS to the memory of Zafari’s best friend, who died in a plane crash the day before college classes began.
The two have started an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to raise the $14,500 needed for materials and equipment to run the Phase 1 trials and to create and optimize a prototype. Early this week, they had raised more than $10,700 toward that goal.
The REDS work started as an extra-credit assignment given by the students’ biology teacher, Rachelle Spell, on the first day of class this semester. The challenge: create a new test for Ebola.
Spell typically provides students an overarching assignment at the beginning of her classes based on a subject that is currently in the news. That theme is used throughout the year in her classes. Last year’s topic was climate change.
“The goal is to empower the students that with some basic understanding of basic biology they can do anything,” Spell said
With the Ebola challenge, the students were to provide their ideas to Spell on the day of the first quiz a week later.
“That’s when I learned they thought they had a great idea and were already starting to work to patent the idea,” she said. “It was a big shock.”
Emory officials and the students themselves caution that there is still a long way to go if REDS is to be marketable.
Zafari and Goldstone are working with an Emory and CDC research scientist, and they must find a way to test REDS.
You have to be cautious when working with Ebola, said David Satcher, a former U.S. surgeon general and former leader of the CDC who established a health leadership institute at the Morehouse School of Medicine. “You can’t just develop something and take it over to Africa,” Satcher said, noting that he was unaware of the REDS test and could not comment directly on it.
But, he said, as science evolves, there will always be better and faster tests developed.
Goldstone says even if REDS doesn’t work, “at best we got our voices heard.”
“Through our entrepreneurial project we want to incite social change,” he said. “This is about raising awareness of this illness and the impact on the world.”
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