This week, Indiegogo is celebrating International Women’s Day. They had a one-day matching project on March 3, featured health projects on March 4 and will feature technology on March 7. (Many healthcare solutions fall under the tech category.) If you haven’t heard, now is the moment for women’s health. Check out these crowdfunded health projects led by or for women and consider making a donation.
Woman-led
QuantuMDx plans to bring the world its “first Handheld Lab with inbuilt DNA sequencing.” Step 1: Diagnosing malaria “super accurately” in less than 15 minutes. Led by CEO Elaine Warburton, this is, yes, a mobile device that sequences your DNA. The idea: The future of healthcare is in your hands, literally. Eventually the team hopes to even diagnose cancer this way. For now, they are focusing on diagnosing malaria in children.
Also smart, they’re crowdsourcing the design, asking donors for input on what the device should look like. Check them out here.
Woman-centered
UPenn nursing students want to bring cervical cancer and breast cancer screening to the remote reaches of rural West Virginia. The patients asked for this program (or something like it) nearly a decade ago, and Wendy Grube, director of the women’s health nurse practitioner program at UPenn, made sure they got it.
“No woman should ever . . . die of cervical cancer in this country,” she says, “so the benefit is to engage women who are uninsured or under-insured, in a screening process so that we can identify any viral conditions that might lead to cancer and we can treat it successfully.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
But the West Virginia Project also benefits the students in learning the urgent importance of social justice issues, she said. Check out the video above. Though the group has met its $1,000 Indiegogo goal, they need $3,000 to fully fund the project.
Women of tomorrow
Devika Patel was born premature. Now, she’s a Stanford sophomore majoring in product design and wants to educate the public about an infant incubator Stanford grads designed. Such students invented a “warmer in a box” for newborns, founding Embrace, which is held up as an exemplar from the guys at IDEO. (Collective sigh for the genius of youth.) It’s especially designed with premature and underweight babies born in developing countries in mind, according to the website. Such a device would replace lightbulbs or hot-water bottles to save these babies from hypothermia. It’s a simple product, reusable and cheap, to boot.
Here, your dollar can make a big impact. The Embrace team wants to raise only $5,000 by March 31 to “to reach 10,000 educators [neonatal healthcare workers and mothers] who will in turn reach over 150,000 low birth weight & premature infants around the world.” Who knows–you could be saving a future healthcare innovator like Patel.
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