CHENNAI:
Sultan Khetani, a postgraduate student of the department of Biomedical
Engineering at SRM University, and his project instructor Dr Shafee Hadi of
Harvard Medical School have won the BRIght Futures Prize 2014 for their
research on fighting HIV/AIDS using a low cost flexible microchip.
The BRIght
Futures Prize is an award with a cash prize of $100,000, for which more than
200 teams from Harvard and MIT affiliates had competed. The winning team was
selected based on online voting conducted across the world. The team had
attracted votes from approximately120 countries worldwide as well as the 50
states of the United States of America. The highest numbers of votes were
acquired from India and the US.
Sultan
Khetani, a Semester Abroad Programme (SAP) student at SRM, joined the research
team at Harvard led by Dr Shafee Hadi, to work on the project ‘Low Cost Hand
held Microchip Device for Rapid HIV Detection and Treatment Monitoring through
Viral Load Measurement on Paper’.
The device
can be compared to a weapon that can potentially revolutionise HIV management
globally, as it will facilitate rapid, simple and inexpensive early diagnosis
of HIV infection and treatment failure for millions of people in urgent need.
The research
work by Dr Hadi Shafiee and Sultan Khetani focuses on a technology that is in
the form of a low-cost, flexible microchip which enables HIV viral load
testing.
This platform
technology is unique with broad applications, and can be adopted to detect
multiple infectious diseases such as hepatitis, influenza, and herpes.
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