Community health workers in Kenya use Deka Readers that have been reprogrammed to give immediate feedback on the quality of the rapid diagnostic test for malaria
Published December 1, 2015, last updated on May 5, 2022 under Research News
$25,000 is a small amount in the world of million dollar research grants. But for Wendy Prudhomme O’Meara, associate professor of medicine and global health, that drop in the bucket has catalyzed quick translation of promising ideas into a new research project.
O’Meara received a supplemental award from the Duke Translational Research Institute this past April. These small grants support development of unanticipated opportunities discovered while working on a government-funded grant.
“Government awards are very strict about how researchers spend the money,” says Kristi Viles, a project manager for Duke Translational Research Institute (DTRI), which oversees the supplemental awards. “We offer these supplemental grants as a way to quickly move an idea that doesn’t fit into the original grant far enough along that the investigators can pursue other funding mechanisms.”
Improving Rapid Diagnostic Testing in the Field
The funds allowed O’Meara to partner with a biotech company to reprogram a small mobile-phone based malaria testing device and use it as a quality control mechanism.
“Many people in Kenya purchase and use anti-malarial drugs without ever confirming that their illness is malaria,” explains O’Meara. “We’re exploring ways to increase the use of rapid diagnostic testing in the field.”
Her original grant involves a large community randomized trial on offering malaria diagnostic testing through community health workers. But as the team trained nearly 350 Kenyans to administer rapid diagnostic tests that require mixing a blood sample with a reagent and visually interpreting the results, they saw the need to monitor the quality of the testing.
The supplemental grant allowed O’Meara’s team to work with the Fio Corporation to reprogram 10 of their Deki Readers, a device created to automatically analyze the rapid diagnostic tests using specially set up mobile phone cameras. Now, in addition to validating the results of the test, the reprogrammed Deki Readers provide real-time feedback on whether the blood sample has been properly prepared.
“The instant feedback is incredibly useful,” O’Meara says. “Community health workers not only can test their own visual interpretation of the test result to see if it matches the result the Deki Reader provides, but they also find out immediately if they are putting in too much blood, or putting it in the wrong place in the testing cassette.”
The investigators are rotating the 10 Deki Readers among the hundreds of community health workers to give each person the opportunity for feedback. The investigators use the results, collected via the internet, to intervene if it appears that a community health worker needs additional training in administering the tests.
O’Meara says that even though the DTRI supplemental award is a small award for a short time, it was an obvious fit for the needs of her study.
“We had a specific technology we wanted to try and we knew it would probably only take a few months to get it up and running,” she says. “We thought about applying for another NIH grant, but the window between applying and funding for NIH grants is much longer. We worried that even if we got funding through the NIH, the original project might be over before we got the devices in the field.”
Yong-hui Jiang, MD, an associate professor of pediatrics who studies the genetic and epigenetic basis of human diseases such as autism, also received a DTRI supplemental grant in April. In collaboration with Duke professors Geraldine Dawson and Allen Song, Jiang is using the award to rapidly move a promising technology for tracking a brain activity biomarker from mouse models into humans.
Seeking Supplemental Funding?
The DTRI is currently accepting applications for supplemental awards of up to $25,000. Visit the website to learn more or apply.
This work was supported by the Duke Clinical and Translational Science Award (Duke CTSA), grant UL1TR001117.
This article was adapted from an article recently posted on the Duke Translational Medicine Institute website and re-published with permission.
