Of the 330 teams that applied to this year's MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, one emerged the grand prize winner Wednesday night: Disease Diagnostic Group, a startup aimed at saving the lives of people battling malaria with the help of magnets and lasers.
The company, founded by John Lewandowski, a PhD student at MIT, has created a malaria diagnostic device that's both portable and reusable. In layman's terms, the product uses a magnet and laser pointer to determine whether or not malaria parasites are present in a patient's blood — all in less than one minute.
Roughly 3.3 billion people are exposed to malaria annually, according to Lewandowski, who reports 500 million individuals are infected. Of those 500 million cases, half go undiagnosed. And of those that are, half of those diagnoses are wrong.
Disease Diagnostic Group won $10,000 in February as part of the MIT $100K Accelerate Contest, a preliminary competition to the finale. At the time of the victory, five prototypes were in clinical testing through the U.S. Navy and Bosch Healthcare. According to BetaBoston, the team is also hosting clinical trials in India and Peru, and has letters of interest for 10 million units for 2015. With the newfound funding, the startup will be able to produce the desired devices.
What's more, the team received the win Wednesday in the most MIT way. Yes, the award was delivered by a drone:
A drone delivered the winner of #MIT100K !! Congrats to Disease Diagnostic Group pic.twitter.com/rky2wuJQYr
— Leila Pirhaji (@Leila_Pirhaji) May 15, 2014
To learn more about Disease Diagnostic Group, check out the video below:
