How Does Rapid Detection Innovation Benefit Global Scientific Development?

5 min readNov 10, 2020

World Science Day for Peace and Development

At OmniVis we envision a world where proactive disease detection advances the health of global communities and cultivates a safer world for future generations. Currently, OmniVis is focused on the rapid detection of cholera and COVID-19. While our mission is to create rapid detection technology that equips communities around the globe with the power and knowledge to protect their health, we can’t do this alone. Therefore, we co-create our technologies by iterating our device with user-centered design methodologies. The input from the user is far more important than how we dream it up in a lab.

The Global Effort to Detect and Mitigate Cholera

Cholera currently causes a $2B economic burden annually in both health-related costs and lost productivity. A global roadmap was released by the multisectoral organization, Global Task Force on Cholera Control (GTFCC), to reduce cholera related deaths by 90% by 2030.

Read the Cholera Control Global Roadmap

One of the main strategies of the GTFCC is to improve early detection of cholera, allowing for a quick response to contain outbreaks of cholera. OmniVis is innovating mobile solutions for rapid detection of cholera in order to mitigate the harms of cholera in global communities. Cholera disproportionately affects women and children. When cholera spreads in a community, women are oftentimes the caretakers in many households; they spend much of their time on collecting water, boiling and filtering it for bacteria, and caring for sick family members. Further, children who suffer from disease are unable to attend school when they’re ill. Early detection of cholera and rapid outbreak response will remove this momentous burden off of women, put children back in school sooner, and enable more opportunities for economic growth with job opportunities in communities susceptible to cholera.

Cholera can be detected in both patient samples and water samples. Omnivis focuses on cholera detection in water at the source as a proactive measure to find cholera in water sources before people get sick. The global standard for cholera detection necessitates access to lab infrastructure which can be costly and slow. The way most labs detect cholera, worldwide, involves collecting large water samples, performing bacterial enrichment, TCBS streaking, Lysogeny broth isolation, serology, polymerase chain reaction, and oftentimes a secondary confirmation at another lab. Lab based cholera detection in water typically yields results in up to 5 days.

When labs are not available, people will sometimes use commercial lateral flow assays (rapid diagnostic tests) that are meant to test for the cholera causing pathogen in patient samples (not water) or use E. coli indicator tests.

How OmniVis is Partnering Globally to Advance Cholera Detection

OmniVis was initiated from a relationship between Purdue University, in Indiana, and the Emerging Pathogens Institute (EPI), from the University of Florida. EPI has a center in Gressier, Haiti, where researchers study cholera presence in environmental water samples and tests 60–80 water sites per month. A Purdue student had a Whitaker Fellowship in Haiti in 2016, and that’s where the relationship was born.

In 2018, our CEO Katherine Clayton contacted University of Notre Dame’s Eck Institute for Global Health to work with master’s students to test the OmniVis device in the field. From that relationship, we met and worked with icddr,b in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2019. icddr,b is the largest and first cholera hospital in the world, and an incredible research center. We met Code for Africa through online presence in 2018, where they reached out via LinkedIn and our website. We had the opportunity to meet Code for Africa members in Washington DC and Nairobi in 2019, and are hoping to perform further work in Kenya in 2021.

Read our partnership updates here: https://www.omnivistech.com/updates

Development Continue Amidst COVID-19

COVID-19 definitely forced OmniVis to understand new and clever ways to work with people across the world. While we are navigating this space, we have strengthened our communication skills with people worldwide, to help with our beta testing and user feedback. Currently, we are looking at how to test mobile, rapid detection devices remotely through shipping our devices abroad, financing the testing, and gathering honest user feedback through video calls. If anything, this challenge is promising for us to create technologies that are completely accessible and can be easily adopted into user workflows.

While we can’t test in the field, we are developing ways to perform device training and testing through strong international collaborations. Further, we are trying to test samples in water collected from the countries that we work in, to mimic a somewhat realistic sample matrix in a laboratory setting. We have also had the opportunity to increase the robustness of our test during this time by adding necessary features (and, in turn, value propositions) into the product that benefits our end users and the communities at large.

Among our partners, responses are generally varied on the world stage while we are all suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of our partners are focused on COVID-19 entirely, as it has affected millions of lives daily. It’s impossible to get away from. In some circumstances, research on cholera prevention has been placed on the back burner. However, there are others who don’t want cholera to be left behind. When a disease like cholera is sidelined, decades of work to overcome such disease outbreaks could be lost.

When the pandemic hit, OmniVis pivoted toward detecting for the COVID-19 causing pathogen, SARS-CoV-2, in saliva samples. We are currently part of XPRIZE and have generously been awarded with an NSF Phase I SBIR grant and Booz Allen Foundation grant to pursue detecting for SARS-CoV-2 with our handheld diagnostic device, making testing more mobile and accessible.

While we are also developing rapid detection technology for COVID-19, we continue our work to improve our Cholera detection technology. NIST, NSF, and GSMA have supported us as we reach more customers and stakeholders and commercialize and scale our product. We feel grateful to work with such stellar organizations.

How Does Rapid Detection Innovation Benefit Global Scientific Development?

The Global Effort to Detect and Mitigate Cholera

How OmniVis is Partnering Globally to Advance Cholera Detection

Development Continue Amidst COVID-19

Written by Ratulsanzidul