Student-developed ‘dosing clips’ distributed nationwide in Swaziland

Rice-developed technology helps caregivers give correct dosages of liquid medication

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

Health officials in Swaziland, Africa, have begun a nationwide distribution of DoseRight dosing clips — an inexpensive global health technology invented by Rice students.

Officials with Swaziland’s Ministry of Health began distributing more than 200,000 of the plastic clips in August for use in the nation’s Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission of HIV/AIDS Program. It is the largest rollout yet of a student-designed global health technology from Rice.

“The DoseRight clips are the result of the ingenuity, hard work and leadership of undergraduates in Riceº’s Beyond Traditional Borders initiative,” said Rebecca Richards-Kortum, the founder and director of Rice 360°: Institute for Global Health Technologies. “We are delighted that the Swazi Ministry of Health, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, and 3^rd Stone Design have been able to make this critical global health tool available to mothers and children across Swaziland.”

Rice 360º has licensed the technology to 3^rd Stone Design. The clips are the first technology developed by students in the Beyond Traditional Borders initiative to be licensed to private industry.

The idea for a tool to ensure accurate dosing of liquid medication came from pediatricians working in HIV-clinics in the developing world, who wanted a way to improve their patients’ adherence to anti-retroviral drug regimens. About one in four people in Swaziland are infected with HIV. Medications are available to prevent the spread of the disease from mothers to newborns, but dosage must be precise.

The dosing clips, which are color-coded to correspond with the correct doses, were created in 2009 at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen by a team of Rice undergraduates in one of Richards-Kortum’s global health technologies courses. Other students in Rice’s Beyond Traditional Borders program and staff at Rice 360° worked for two years to develop partnerships and secure the necessary approvals for a nationwide rollout of the technology in Swaziland.

“We are very proud of our students not only for developing this elegant solution to misdosing of liquid medication, but also for working with government officials, medical professionals, and non-governmental organizations in Swaziland to help make this rollout a reality,” said Richards-Kortum, the Stanley C. Moore Professor of Bioengineering at Rice.

At the annual Clinton Global Initiative University meeting in San Diego in April, former President Bill Clinton brought several Rice students on stage and praised their work on the dosing clip project.

“This tool will save an inordinate number of lives,” Clinton said. “We could do this in every country with any kind of HIV infection rate. It would help everywhere.”