Each year, bacterial pneumonia and malaria alone claim the lives of 3 million children under the age of five. Accurate diagnosis and treatment is extremely difficult in resource-poor settings because patients afflicted with different infectious diseases can present with similar symptoms, fever being the most common. Unfortunately, healthcare providers often lack the tools necessary to determine the etiology of fever (e.g., viral, bacterial, or parasitic infection), and instead use season-based methods for diagnosis. This results in patient misdiagnosis, incorrect treatment and poor outcomes. With our test, we believe that we can help alleviate this burden.

Innovostics, a collaborative effort between the Johns Hopkins Center for Bioengineering Innovation & Design and the Department of Pathology, is developing a low-cost, point-of-care microfluidics platform to provide affordable antigen-antibody based diagnostic testing. This platform is able to dramatically decrease cost and provide rapid results with only a finger prick of blood. With the Innovostics InfecDx fever test, rural healthcare workers will be able to differentiate between viral, bacterial and parasitic infection, and provide patients with the appropriate medication.