Meet Amy Openshaw and Beth-Marie McDonald, possibly the two most exciting scientists/ entrepreneurs in the world today. This team has developed a simple filter that HIV-positive mothers can use to stop their babies contracting HIV from breast milk.
For once, journalistic hyperbole can’t do a new invention justice. This filter could change the way millions of HIV-positive mothers bring up their babies, it could revolutionize HIV care, and most of all it could save hundreds of millions of lives.
But what exactly is the device, how does it work and how on earth did two fresh-faced PhD students from a small northern university develop it? Milly Shaw investigates…
Amy and Beth-Marie, also known as Osiris Biotechnology, are £12,500 richer than they were two hours ago. It’s the end of the awards ceremony for Blueprint: the North East universities business planning competition, and the two women are reeling from having won third prize in the business awards and the much-coveted first prize in the science and technology award. The two University of Newcastle bio-chemistry Phd students won the cash with their simple filter which allows mothers with diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis to safely breastfeed their child.
“Before we started this, we were actually shocked at the number of diseases that are transmitted in breast milk,” explains Beth-Marie. “If the baby doesn’t catch HIV through the birth canal, he or she has a 30% chance of catching it through breast milk.”
“But breast milk has nutrients and antibodies that are vitally important for babies,” adds Amy. “A child has just a one in six chance of survival if its not breastfed. In fact 1.5 million children die every single year because they’re not absolutely breastfed. And yet until now there’s been absolutely nothing done to help HIV-positive mothers breastfeed safely.”
HIV alone is the fourth-largest killer in the world, and one third of babies born to HIV-positive mothers contract the disease from mother-child interaction. But for many HIV-positive mothers from developing countries, the choice is often a simple one – breastfeed and risk passing on HIV, or don’t breastfeed and watch the baby die of malnutrition or water-borne diseases.
So how does this new HIV-blocking filter work, and what does it look like? “We’ve got to be very careful in describing how it works because of the IP (intellectual property) issues, but its basically the filter selectively targets disease particles, but allows nutrients and antibodies to pass through,” says Beth-Marie.
But is it some kind of kit that poor mothers won’t be able to afford or know how to use? “Not at all,” explains Amy. “Imagine something the size of a pound coin that fits into a silicone shield, which is then placed straight on the breast allowing the baby to feed through it. Silicone shields are already very commonly used by breastfeeding mothers suffering from cracked nipples, and they’re very common in this country (the UK) too – it’s not just a developing world thing. The filter we’ve developed can be easily sterilised by boiling in water, and they are extremely simple to use.”
Osiris Biotechnology clearly have the knowledge, the capability, the desire and some cash to develop the filter into a product which could be used by every HIV-positive mother in the world. So what’s the next step?
“We’re going to use the prize money for full market research,” says Beth-Marie. “We need to show that there is demand for our product before we can get anyone interested in the product line. So first we’re going to pay for a full market survey, which will cost about £10,000. Eventually we’ll be licensing the product to pharmaceutical companies, medical advice distributors, and non-profit organisations and charities, and then they’ll be taking it off our hands from that point forward. The market we’re aiming for devotes $25 billion dollar solely for the prevention of HIV from mother to child. Our product fits in completely with these programmes. The infrastructure is all there already, so if it takes off it’ll be really brilliant in terms of improving people’s lives.”
Surely that’s not so much a ‘if’ as a ‘when’. Amy Openshaw and Beth-Marie McDonald: remember those names.
