2019 marks the 18th year of IDEAS. Since its inception, the program has awarded more than 1 million dollars to 160 social ventures operating in 44 different countries. After winning, IDEAS teams have gone on to secure over 65 million dollars in funding and about half are still operating today. Last year's winning teams have already gone on to develop a multipurpose sleeping bag for refugee families in the Middle East, design low-cost, inflatable seat cushions for wheelchair users in Indonesia, and launch mobile apps to do things such as access indoor air quality information in China and empower communities to document and preserve their indigenous languages.
This year's projects included 16 undergraduate students, 50 graduate students, and 11 other MIT community members. Ten impact-driven student teams tackling a wide range of problems around the world took home 100,000 dollars in combined awards at the MIT IDEAS innovation and social entrepreneurship showcase and awards last Saturday. A total of 34 teams, many members of which are already in the early stages of company building, displayed their projects at the event.
The grand prize of 15,000 dollars was awarded to Myco Diagnostics, a startup that is working on a urine-based test to cheaply and quickly diagnose tuberculosis in low-resource areas of India. Tuberculosis, or TB, is traditionally diagnosed through chest X-rays or skin test analysis that requires medical professionals to examine microscopic samples. But for impoverished people in developing countries dealing with common TB symptoms like coughing or a fever, it can be difficult to travel to the nearest clinic. The result is that only about 35 percent of the nearly 3 million people with TB in India get diagnosed. That makes it much more likely the disease will be transmitted to family members and people in the local community.
"If you're living on two dollars a day, you don't necessarily have the financial freedom to travel to these clinics," Myco Diagnostics co-founder Eric Miller, a PhD candidate in the Department of Chemical Engineering, told MIT News. "We're trying to replace that diagnostic with something that is decentralized, that can go to the patient."
To accomplish that, Myco has re-engineered a set of proteins to bind with urine-based biomarkers of tuberculosis while staying stable enough to be stored at room temperature for long periods of time. It is also developing methods for cheaply grouping those proteins on paper so that, when exposed to urine, they can quickly show test results.
"Studies have shown that if you could cut the time to diagnosis from six months down to three months, over the course of 10 years you could reduce incidence of TB by 65 percent," Miller says.
Each year, IDEAS serves as a launchpad for new ventures with sustainable impact. Saturday's showcase and awards were the culmination of a process that began at the beginning of the academic year, when 68 teams entered the MIT IDEAS program. Teams received feedback and support from industry experts, past IDEAS winners, and more than a dozen centers and programs across campus throughout the program.
Each of the projects fell into one of nine categories: water and sanitation, education and training, agriculture and food, health and medical, emergency and disaster relief, housing and transportation, energy and environment, mobile device and communication, and finance and entrepreneurship.
