Aldatu Biosciences wins Deans’ Health and Sciences Challenge

In this year’s Deans’ Health and Life Sciences Challenge, Aldatu Biosciences, a venture created by Harvard students and researchers, took home the Bertarelli Foundation Grand Prize and $40,000 in award money.

Sponsored by deans from across the university and hosted at the Harvard innovation lab (i-lab), the challenge called for undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral and clinical fellows from across Harvard’s Schools to identify technologies that can be realized as implementable solutions to transform quality of care and life for populations around the world.

“This challenge is a small measure of us trying to see if we can catalyze this university and all of its amazing resources to come together and find answers to the many challenges that lie in this field,” said Nitin Nohria, dean of the Harvard Business School (HBS) and co-chair of the challenge. “The forty-two entries of this challenge demonstrate that people can convert these problems into opportunities.”

Aldatu Biosciences is commercializing technology that enables cost-effective, accurate, and efficient diagnosis of patients infected by drug-resistant strains of HIV.

Two other student-led teams were named runners-up and were each awarded $5000 to help grow their ventures: FlowLight is creating a medical device that monitors post-surgery blood flow to improve patient care and lower personal time and cost; Disease Diagnostic Group is building a diagnostic device that can easily and accurately identify patients infected with malaria.