VaxTrac

Early in an organization's life, people like to say that you are "launching" the organization. That certainly sounds exciting and evokes images of hang gliding instead of the endless stream of paperwork which is often more accurate. Still, hang gliding is an apt metaphor for what we have been doing. To successfully make it from the cliff to the ground, you need three things: a decent glider design, enough forward momentum, and the willingness to jump. We have never shied away from the cliff edge, and we have worked diligently to ensure we have a good design. And now it looks like we are finally getting that much-needed momentum.

We have spent the past 11 months building software and raising funds. In October we launched with our first pilot program in rural India. We completed the program last week, and from the preliminary results, we can confidently state that our concepts are sound. While in India, we received some great news from the US. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced that VaxTrac will be awarded $100,000 as part of their Grand Challenges Exploration program. In addition to providing some much needed cash for the next stage of development, the award raises our profile within the community and should help us attract new funders and supporters. Continue reading below for additional detail on the major events of the past several months.

Gates Foundation awards VaxTrac $100,000 grant

We are proud to announce that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has recently selected VaxTrac to receive a one-year grant of $100,000 specifically to investigate the use of mobile phones to track childhood vaccinations. Our project was selected from a pool of over 2,400 applications.

Within the scope of this grant, we will be adapting our platform to low-cost cellular phones. Mobile phones are becoming practically ubiquitous even in the developing world, and these devices offer an attractive balance of affordability and mobility. While the challenge is daunting, we believe that we have the right team in place to accomplish our goal of providing a set of tools that truly transforms the way vaccination works.

Pilot program successfully completed

In early October, we launched our first pilot program in India in partnership with the Mission India Foundation. MIF is a US-based non-profit that provides vaccinations and works to improve the immunization process. For our joint project, VaxTrac joined MIF in Narnaul, a community of approximately 100,000 people that lies roughly 90 miles southwest of New Delhi.

We spent six weeks in the field with MIF as they provided vaccines throughout the community. The pilot program was a complete success, and we met our two main objectives: proving that the concept works and isolating area for improvement. Over the course of the project, the VaxTrac system successfully enrolled hundreds of children - aged one to six - in both rural and urban settings.

The software development and project planning took nearly four months, and it could not have been completed without the help of our partners around the globe. We worked with people in places as diverse as San Francisco, Germany, Ghana, and the Philippines; needless to say, we have run up some pretty impressive phone bills in the process.

New team members

We are excited to announce the addition of Joe Fairchild to our team as Director of Technology. Joe is a computer engineer with a background that spans a shocking amount of real estate in all subjects computational. At VaxTrac, he will be responsible for the design and implementation of all software and hardware projects. Joe is an honors graduate of the University of Michigan, a former "Mr. Engineer", and last year he spent a couple of months running across the US, from Massachusetts to California. We appreciate that type of crazy.

We are also pleased to introduce Rachael Hunt, our new Director of Corporate Strategy. Rachael's background spans a wide array of various parts of the healthcare and life sciences field. She will be responsible for building partnerships with external organizations and helping to develop our funding strategy. Everyone is afraid to play her in Stratego.

It's been quite a year for us so far. We are dreaming big and working hard towards our next field test period panned for February. Thank you for your continued support of VaxTrac. In lieu of a closing paragraph, here are some links that are germane to the past two months of our work.

Bill Gates blogged about us.

We answered the question, "Is fingerprinting children viable?"

We turned a farmhouse into a temporary office.

We were somehow placed in quite good company.