Fast-forward three years. You are in a small outreach clinic in southern Africa. You have classic symptoms: fever, nausea, chills, fatigue. A woman bustles around the clinic, checking on patients who are hooked up to uniquely conceived dialysis machines. There are a dozen of the machines in the room—each just a little bigger than a piece of carry-on luggage. It's your turn. The nurse inserts a needle into each of your arms—one draining all of the blood from your body, the other replacing it. You will rest for a few hours while this small machine weeds out diseased cells and returns healthy ones. You are combating a disease that kills more people in Africa than AIDS. Bill Gates calls it the greatest tragedy to human health. You came in with malaria, and you'll leave cured.
Several research studies support this futuristic malaria-curing dialysis. The only part of hemoglobin in red blood cells that the malaria parasite does not attack is iron. With a magnetic filter, the infected cells can be removed, and only healthy ones are returned to the body.
There are also medicines that effectively combat the disease. But the people who need them can't afford them. And the dialysis machines have never been produced because of the difficulty in finding an investor when under-developed countries are the target market.
Salman Mukhtar and Alberto Gandini, however, are working to get it done. The two Tepper School graduate students have pitched a business called Tropical Health Systems, which aims to combat the humbling obstacles. By conceptualizing the machines as small and portable, by needing only a nurse or trained personnel to run them, and by making the cost to patients minimal, Mukhtar and Gandini have created a detailed business plan that might just work.
The plan won first prize in the Life Sciences track at the fifth annual McGinnis Venture Competition hosted by Carnegie Mellon. The competition attracted 23 teams from many of the world's top MBA schools. For coming in first, Mukhtar and Gandini were awarded $20,000 in cash and another $25,000 in business services to put their plan into action.
"We know we can build it," says Gandini, who also has a PhD in physics. "We just needed the money to do it." They now have lawyers working on a patent and have the cash to build their first prototype.
—KATE DUNFEE
