Newsletter: May 2010

In this newsletter:

• Mobile Health Luminaries and Googlers.
• Conferences, Presentations, and Mark Thomas as the official blogger of the World Vaccine Conference.
• $20,000 in seed money and The Gates Foundation Grand Challenge.
• The first release of VaxTrac’s Vaccination Registry.
• Pilot Programs in the works all around the globe.

June 3, 2010

Dear Supporter,

Welcome to the first VaxTrac newsletter. Let me first apologize for the length of this letter. For a couple of engineers, Mark and I have been doing a lot of writing lately. While we are fairly competent at getting our thoughts on to the page, we were never properly taught when or how to stop.

Our work over the last five months has largely consisted of answering the following questions, first for ourselves and then for others. What exactly are we trying to accomplish? How are we going to accomplish it? To help answer these questions, we’ve met with anyone and everyone willing to listen, including epidemiologists, supply chain experts, vaccine manufacturers, mobile health luminaries, Googlers and countless global health gurus. After refining and fleshing out our business model, we decided it was time to unveil VaxTrac to the health community.

We spent April attending academic conferences at Harvard and Yale in addition to two very different conferences in Washington DC. The first DC event was the World Vaccine Congress where executives from the world’s pharmaceutical companies come to talk about the vaccine business. To bypass the $4500 registration fee, Mark cagily landed a job as the official blogger of the Congress. The other DC event was a smaller affair called Africa Gathering, which brought together technologists, philanthropists and entrepreneurs who focus on the African continent. We were invited to give presentations at the Global Health and Innovation conference at Yale and at Africa Gathering. The responses to both were overwhelmingly positive. Through our presentations and interactions at these conferences, we were approached for partnerships which we will be bringing forward during our pilot phase later this summer.

In parallel to our work defining, refining, and presenting VaxTrac the product, we’ve spent an equal amount of time and effort building VaxTrac the organization. Our primary focus has been raising capital. We’ve sent countless letters of inquiry to foundations, corporations and other NGOs. In March we decided to build our grant writing capacity by creating an internship in Chicago to focus primarily on fund raising. We originally planned to take only one intern, but with an unexpectedly large applicant pool of over fifty, we decided to take two exemplary young people. Not only have Yoshina and Kelsey been instrumental in our fund raising efforts, they are helping us build a better, more valuable internship for our next class.

As anyone who has dealt with the typical grant application process can tell you, it can be frustrating; and worst of all, a great application may not garner an award. Fortunately, we are starting to make some progress on this front. In May we received $20,000 in seed money from a group of private donors. This grant will allow us to complete work on our first software release and begin pilot programs. We’re still a long ways from our fund raising objectives for the year and our goal of four paid staff, but we’re completing our program objectives on a very thin budget with the help of various partner organizations. We do anticipate winning more grants in the near future. The Gates Foundation Grand Challenge round five for which we are competing is seemingly aimed directly at VaxTrac, with stated objectives of mobility, biometrics, and improvements in the immunization system.

The next couple of months will be very exciting for us. We are on schedule to release the first beta version of our vaccination registry software at the end of July. While we weren’t able to fit every feature we would have liked into this release, we are confident that it will meet and exceed our primary objective: assuring each child receives the appropriate vaccines at the correct time. Upon release, we will begin conducting pilot programs with partner organizations to assess usability and efficacy. We are currently in talks to begin programs in Nicaragua, Uganda, India and Pakistan. To build robust program assessments, we will deploy in as many different geographies as possible. The number of programs we are able to run concurrently is a function of both the support we can raise from partner organizations, donors and grantors, and our ability to survive on scant amounts of sleep.

All in all the past five months have been extremely productive. We’re building to a spectacular finish to 2010 with successful partnerships and pilot projects. As always our most valuable asset is you. We rely on your continued support to grow. Please consider making a contribution through the donate! page on our website. Now more than ever we need your help spreading the word about VaxTrac. Tell your neighbor to check out our website. Blast out a missive on Twitter referencing @vaxtrac. Suggest your friends become a ‘fan’ of VaxTrac on Facebook. These things may seem inconsequential but as we’ve found out, you never know who might be on the other end.

Thank you for reading and for your continued support of VaxTrac.

Best,

Shawn Sarwar

Research Director
shawn.sarwar@vaxtrac.com