TED2010
Frederick Balagadde: Bio-lab on a microchip
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Drugs alone can't stop disease in sub-Saharan Africa: We need diagnostic tools to match. TED Senior Fellow Frederick Balagadde shows how we can multiply the power and availability of an unwieldy, expensive diagnostic lab -- by miniaturizing it to the size of a chip.
Frederick Balagadde - Inventor
TED Senior Fellow Frederick Balagadde invented the micro-chemostat, a first-of-its-kind, dime-sized piece of transparent plastic that can orchestrate the behavior of living cells. Full bio
TED Senior Fellow Frederick Balagadde invented the micro-chemostat, a first-of-its-kind, dime-sized piece of transparent plastic that can orchestrate the behavior of living cells. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
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The greatest irony in global health
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is that the poorest countries
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carry the largest disease burden.
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If we resize the countries of the globe
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in proportion to the subject of interest,
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we see that Sub-Saharan Africa
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is the worst hit region by HIV/AIDS.
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This is the most devastating epidemic of our time.
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We also see that this region
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has the least capability in terms of dealing with the disease.
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There are very few doctors
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and, quite frankly, these countries do not have the resources
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that are needed to cope
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with such epidemics.
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So what the Western countries,
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developed countries, have generously done
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is they have proposed to provide free drugs
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to all people in Third World countries
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who actually can't afford these medications.
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And this has already saved millions of lives,
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and it has prevented entire economies
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from capsizing in Sub-Saharan Africa.
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But there is a fundamental problem
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that is killing the efforts
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in fighting this disease,
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because if you keep throwing
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drugs out at people
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who don't have diagnostic services,
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you end up creating a problem of drug resistance.
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This is already beginning to happen in Sub-Saharan Africa.
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The problem is that,
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what begins as a tragedy in the Third World
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could easily become a global problem.
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And the last thing we want to see
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is drug-resistant strains of HIV
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popping up all over the world,
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because it will make treatment more expensive
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and it could also restore
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the pre-ARV carnage of HIV/AIDS.
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I experienced this firsthand
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as a high school student in Uganda.
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This was in the 90s
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during the peak of the HIV epidemic,
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before there were any ARVs in Sub-Saharan Africa.
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And during that time, I actually lost more relatives,
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as well as the teachers who taught me,
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to HIV/AIDS.
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So this became one of the driving passions of my life,
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to help find real solutions
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that could address these kinds of problems.
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We all know about the miracle of miniaturization.
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Back in the day, computers used to fill this entire room,
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and people actually used to work inside the computers.
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But what electronic miniaturization has done
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is that it has allowed people to shrink
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technology into a cell phone.
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And I'm sure everyone here enjoys cell phones
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that can actually be used in the remote areas of the world,
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in the Third World countries.
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The good news is that the same technology
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that allowed miniaturization of electronics
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is now allowing us to miniaturize
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biological laboratories.
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So, right now, we can actually miniaturize
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biological and chemistry laboratories
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onto microfluidic chips.
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I was very lucky to come
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to the US right after high school,
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and was able to work on this technology
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and develop some devices.
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This is a microfluidic chip that I developed.
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A close look at how the technology works:
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These are channels that are about the size of a human hair --
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so you have integrated valves, pumps, mixers and injectors --
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so you can fit entire diagnostic experiments
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onto a microfluidic system.
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So what I plan to do with this technology
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is to actually take the current state
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of the technology
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and build an HIV kit
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in a microfluidic system.
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So, with one microfluidic chip,
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which is the size of an iPhone,
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you can actually diagnose
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100 patients at the same time.
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For each patient, we will be able to do
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up to 100 different viral loads per patient.
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And this is only done in four hours,
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50 times faster than the current state of the art,
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at a cost that will be five to 500 times cheaper
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than the current options.
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So this will allow us to create
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personalized medicines in the Third World
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at a cost that is actually achievable
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and make the world a safer place.
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I invite your interest
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as well as your involvement
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in driving this vision
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to a point of practical reality.
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Frederick Balagadde - InventorTED Senior Fellow Frederick Balagadde invented the micro-chemostat, a first-of-its-kind, dime-sized piece of transparent plastic that can orchestrate the behavior of living cells.
Why you should listen
Frederick Balagadde is a research scientist in the Engineering Technologies Division at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. As a graduate student at Caltech and Stanford University, Frederick invented the micro-chemostat: a first-of-its-kind microfabricated fluidic chip that mimics a biological cell culture environment in a highly complex web of tiny pumps and human hair-sized water hoses, all controlled by a multitasking computer.
Frederick's pioneering research has attracted interest in the scientific community, including a publication in Science Magazine.
Frederick was a TEDGlobal 2009 Fellow and is a TED Senior Fellow.
Frederick Balagadde | Speaker | TED.com