Biomedical Engineering Students are Saving Thousands of Lives

Pratt Pouch

Published September 15, 2014, last updated on April 9, 2018 under Research News

This story is featured as part of the Duke Today series on Duke's Entrepreneurial Spirit

Sometimes entrepreneurship at Duke looks like a packet of ketchup.

That describes the Pratt Pouch. Mothers in developing countries who are infected with HIV can squeeze its contents into their babies’ mouths right after birth, providing them with a measured dose of antiretroviral medication. The pouch extends the drug’s shelf life, travels well and has great potential to save lives in Africa and other regions where HIV is prevalent and mothers often give birth at home.

In 2012, the World Health Organization named it one of its Top 10 Most Innovative Health Technologies.

Robert Malkin, a biomedical engineering and global health professor at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering and the Duke Global Health Institute, says his students helped develop the pouch “in every step and at every stage, from basic research to business plan development.” They worked on a financing model to bring the device to market and made pitches for partnerships and funding.

Malkin’s students, many of whom took his course on Design for the Developing World, have developed other successful products as well. One is a portable phototherapy device that treats infant jaundice, the world’s leading cause of preventable brain damage. It has long-lasting bulbs and runs on motorcycle batteries.

As with students in Nimmi Ramanujam’s lab, those working with Malkin are learning to blend technology with entrepreneurship, gaining skills and perspective that will serve them long after they graduate. “If students are interested in bringing something out of the lab,” he says, “I always continue to work with them, sometimes for many years.”

 

Malkin's work was recently featured in Science Careers.