Low-cost CD4 counters for Africa

Professor Robinson and his team at Purdue are developing a low-cost CD4 counter for AIDS patients in Africa. The goal of the project is to reduce the cost from $12 to under 50c. This effort is being supported Parker Hannefin.

Dr. Robinson makes a key observation that we feel is important to keep in mind when developing technologies for low-resource settings:

"The fancy $100,000 machines are very complicated because they are designed to perform a hundred different tests, but you only need one," Robinson said. "So you are paying for an instrument to do a hundred things when it only needs to do one, and then, at the end of the day, it's not even doing one thing. It's a real tragedy. Our cell analyzers will do only one test and do it well."

Read more about it here

Tags: cd4 count africa HIV Purdue