When Dr. Jason Marion first began working in the Department of Environment Health Science at Eastern Kentucky University nearly a decade ago, he was introduced to a handful of Kenyan graduate students studying public health.
The students, all athletes, were interested in completing their masters project back in their native country. And with Marion's background in global health and infectious diseases, he knew about the water crisis Kenya was enduring.
According to water.org, 32% of Kenya's 50 million citizens rely on unimproved water sources, such as ponds, shallow wells and rivers and 48% lack access to basic sanitation solutions. Kenya isn't alone either — 663 million people rely on unimproved sources globally, including 159 million dependent on surface water, according to the World Health Organization.
"There was a real genuine need [in Kenya] for doing assessments of the water quality," Marion said. "I heard it over and over and over again from people."
The issue? It's expensive. And for a low-resource nation like Kenya, the costly testing materials used to identify E. coli bacteria in water sources didn't exactly solve the problem.
"We needed to be able to do this stuff at a lower cost without the initial $5,000 investment," Marion continued.
Almost 10 years later, that need for innovation to aid in lower-cost water quality research has spurred a business opportunity for the EKU associate professor.
Through his work with students in Kenya, Marion became acquainted with Dr. Anakalo Shitandi, director of research and outreach at Kisii University in 2018. It was the vice chancellor of the university, John Akama, that expressed the need for water tests.
That request set Marion on a path to develop ColiGlow, a low-cost kit that can quantify E. coli from water in low-resource environments. In May, the product won the 2021 Global Health and Innovation Conference (GHIC) Innovation Prize.
ColiGlow is the first product from Marion's newly-formed startup, Eastern Scientific LLC, and its development was funded through EKU's Board of Regents Innovation Fund.
"Jason is an example of what faculty at EKU can do when they're given the encouragement, the runway and the access to resources to get that accomplished," said Dr. Tom Martin, associate provost for research and economic development, and executive director of the center for economic development, entrepreneurship and technology at EKU.
Martin said EKU President David McFaddin and the university's board have offered more than $900,000 in available commitment for innovative ideas over the last three years. But bringing those ideas to fruition wouldn't be possible without the assistance of Kentucky Commercialization Ventures (KCV), he continued.
"If we were to do this and resource it 100% on our own, Jason would be the only one," Martin said. "But we've got a couple of other patents filed and one on the way, and we can afford to do that because of our partnership with KCV. It helps us determine the value and the marketability of these ideas to be successful."
Megan Aanstoos, licensing and new ventures manager at KCV, began working with Marion and Martin in 2019 and helped them file a provisional patent on the product in February 2020. She then plugged Marion into Launch Blue's UAccel program, a 12-week bootcamp that allowed him to do market discovery and customer analysis to determine if the business opportunity was viable.
"What we're really looking forward to now is getting the business off the ground," Aanstoos said. "Hopefully within a few weeks, we will have executed a licensing agreement between Eastern Scientific and EKU to allow Jason to continue to do some of this work under the company name.
"Basically in the last year and a half since we got started, we went from a concept to a protected piece of intellectual property with a company behind it."
ColiGlow, which has been field tested in Kentucky and Kenya, produces light-up visual results (hence the name) and requires no labs or expensive equipment, making it great for educators and citizen science groups, Marion said. When it is available to purchase, 10% of sales will fund kits to go to organizations in Western Kenya and low-resource community groups focused on drinking water quality in Eastern Kentucky.
"It really inspires people to care about their environment because you can't see E. coli and fecal contamination in your water, but with ColiGlow you can," he said. "That really gets people — kids, teachers, volunteers — to mobilize and say, 'What can we do about it?'"
