The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a reputation for being on the bleeding edge of technology- home to particle accelerators, military nanotechnology, and hallway roaming robots. So then why is Dr. Jose Gomez-Marquez’ laboratory a veritable toy store – strewn with plastic toys, tubes, plungers, coffee filters, syringes and fake body parts? Oddly enough, he is inventing a new generation of low-cost medical devices.
Poor countries are unable to maintain modern medical infrastructure- devices cost too much, are difficult to maintain and require specialized training to operate. An example are drug delivery systems: “The device was sitting in a fancy box in eggshell foam”, recalls Gomez-Marquez, “If it needs foam to survive a trip to New England, it’s never going to make it to Central America … If the aerosolizing head broke, the machine had to be sent back.” Gomez-Marquez, after developing his own vaccine vaporizer inspired by disposable ink-jet printers, summed up his philosophy, “In our case, because it’s just 10 cents, you can throw the broken one away and pull another one out of the box.”
Dr. Gomez-Marquez’ lab has developed a whole portfolio of medical devices. Some examples: a tuberculosis drug test strip made from chemically treated coffee filters, an unpowered centrifuge built from tubing and a toilet plunger, and an asthma inhaler inspired by a plastic toy helicopter.
We’d like to congratulate Dr. Gomez-Marquez on his Humanitarian of the Year TR35 award. We think his work is incredible from both a humanitarian and technical perspective. Dr. Michelle Khine, Shrink’s scientific founder, got her start making microfluidic devices with just a toaster oven, inkjet printer and Shrinky Dinks, a plastic toy for children. We really like the idea of making Do-It-Yourself state-of-the-art devices out of toys and miscellanea and have cobbled together quite a few ourselves- vortex micromixers, plasmonic waveguides, 3d diagnostic chips, etc.
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