Let’s get to know the WINNER of Demo Day!
The public presentation of the demonstrators prepared by the MedTech-Athon finalists – Demo Day took place on February 28, 2023!
Three teams competed during the event:
– FluoFibers (Adrian Duszczyk – leader, Bartłomiej Bałamut, Sylwia Karoń, Marcin Lelit, Paweł Rękas, Anna Szymczyk),
– Personal-Sensbox (Kasper Marchlewicz – leader, Szymon Baczyński, Dominik Kołodziejek, Monika Nisiewicz),
– Scienceporium (Joanna Baran – leader, Mohammed Edawdi, Varun Nair Gopalakrishnan, Laboni Manna, Jakub Sikora).
These teams were selected during the final of MedTech-Athon, which took place in May 2022. Since then, research and development work on these projects has been carried out.
The presentation of the demonstrators took place at the Center for Advanced Materials and Technology of the Warsaw University of Technology CEZAMAT WUT. Each team had 10 minutes to present their project, and then the jury and the gathered audience participated in the debate, asking questions to the participants.
The jury was composed of prof. Mariusz Malinowski – chairman, prof. Zbigniew Brzózka, prof. Marek Krawczyk, Łukasz Sztern and Mariusz Wielec.
The jury decided that the winner is Scienceporium team!
The project prepared by Scienceporium is a “cigarette” test that detects the Lassa virus. As the team argued, it is this virus that has the greatest potential to cause an epidemic in which the mortality rate could be as high as 50%. The threat is all the greater because there is currently no known effective drug or vaccine against this virus.
The authors of the project claim that the best way to reduce the spread of the virus is preventive self-testing at home, which would enable their “cigarette” test. The test result could be read after 15 minutes. Currently, only laboratory tests are available, which are more expensive than the proposed solution, and the shortest time to obtain results in a laboratory test is as much as 2 working days.
In addition, the solution presented by Scienceporium has a unique advantage: the tests are biodegradable. This is extremely important due to the region where the virus is found. Around 19 million tons of plastic are generated in Africa, and as much as 17 million tons are not properly managed.
