Simple Medical Device Provides Better Way to Diagnose Pneumonia

Call it lean design, these Georgia Tech students created a device that will save lives

Published: Monday, February 7, 2011 - 06:00

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a new sampling device that could prevent thousands of people worldwide from dying of pneumonia each year.

Called PneumoniaCheck, the device created at Georgia Tech, is a solution to the problem of diagnosing pneumonia, which is a major initiative of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Pneumonia, an inflammation of the lungs, kills about 2.4 million people each year. The problem is particularly devastating in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Eastern Mediterranean, where a child dies of pneumonia every 15 seconds.

Developed by mechanical engineering students, graduate business students, and faculty at Georgia Tech, PneumoniaCheck will be commercially launched this month to health care professionals through the start-up company, MD Innovate Inc.

“Georgia Tech created a simple and new device to detect the lung pathogens causing pneumonia,” says David Ku, Georgia Tech regents’ professor of mechanical engineering, and Lawrence P. Huang endowed chair in engineering and entrepreneurship and professor of surgery at Emory University. “It has the potential to save more lives than any other medical device.”

Last year, Ku was asked by the head of virology at the CDC to develop a quick and economical way to diagnose pneumonia, particularly in developing nations where it is a leading cause of death among children.

Ku challenged a group of mechanical engineering and bioengineering graduate students to develop an accurate device for diagnosing pneumonia. Current sampling methods using the mouth and nose are only 40-percent effective. The samples are typically contaminated by bacteria in the mouth, which leads to misdiagnosis and an incorrect prescription of antibiotics.

In developing nations, many children with respiratory infections fail to receive adequate care, and the overuse of antibiotics has led to an increase in drug-resistant bacteria. An accurate, easy-to-use and widely available new diagnostic test could improve identification of bacterial respiratory infection in children, reducing the inappropriate use of antibiotics and the long-term negative effects of drug resistance, according to the recent article in Nature, “Reducing the global burden of acute lower respiratory infections in children: the contribution of new diagnostics.”

As a Georgia Tech graduate student, Tamera Scholz and her peers developed the solution—PneumoniaCheck.

The device contains a plastic tube with a mouthpiece. A patient coughs into the device to fill up a balloon-like upper airway reservoir before the lung aerosols go into a filter. Using fluid mechanics, PneumoniaCheck separates the upper airway particles of the mouth from the lower airway particles coming from the lungs.

“It’s interesting because it’s so simple,” says Scholz, who is now an engineer for Newell Rubbermaid. “It’s not a fancy contraption. It’s a device that patients cough into and through fluid mechanics it separates upper and lower airway aerosols. Through each iteration, it got simpler. I like that I will be able to see it make a difference in my lifetime.”

Once the device was developed, Taylor Bronikowski and a group of Georgia Tech MBA students from the College of Management started developing a business plan for PneumoniaCheck that starts locally and grows globally. They used the device as a test case to develop a triple bottom line company in India that could result in financial profits, environmental sustainability, and social benefits, such as jobs and health care.

“Our goal is to provide better medicine at a cost savings to patients and hospitals,” Bronikowski said. “We wanted a worldwide solution, so patients in developing nations can afford it.”

Bronikowksi, Ku, and Sarah Ku formed the start-up company, MD Innovate Inc., in 2010 to manufacture the device in large quantities and organize distribution and commercialization.

According to Ku, the device is now being used in pneumonia studies at Grady Memorial Hospital in downtown Atlanta and the Atlanta Veterans Administration Medical Center. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared PneumoniaCheck for sale in the United States. The device is licensed but its patent is pending. The company will start selling PneumoniaCheck in the United States in January and it could hit other countries in two years.

“It’s a great feeling, working on something that has the potential to save thousands of lives,” says Bronikowski.

On the horizon, Ku and future Georgia Tech graduate students will be developing a simple and effective method for diagnosing pneumonia in regions without health care facilities or basic infrastructure.

About The Author

Georgia Institute of Technology

The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the nation’s top research universities, distinguished by its commitment to improving the human condition through advanced science and technology. Georgia Tech’s campus occupies 400 acres in the heart of the city of Atlanta, where 20,000 undergraduate and graduate students receive a focused, technologically-based education.