Ovolution

Inspiration

The concept for Ovolution was developed in 2019 during a Hackathon in Hong Kong. We were inspired by the personal experience of one of our team mates who lives in Pakistan. In her medical studies she witnessed how a women was beaten up by her husband because she wouldn't get pregnant. What she didn't know at the time is that there was an explanation for their infertility - which was polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).

What it does

Ovolution is a self screening test for PCOS which affects around 10% of women in reproductive age. Untreated PCOS can lead to severe metabolic diseases like hyperglycemia, hyperlipoproteinemia and infertility. Due to limited access to gynecologists, stigmatization of female reproductive health and high costs of traditional diagnostic tools, PCOS often remains undiagnosed in emerging countries. This is where we want to step in. Our idea is to develop a screening test, that uses menstrual blood as an easily accessible blood sample to detect altered levels of sexual hormones as an indicator for PCOS. The test would be embedded in a sanitary pad and would work just as simple as a pregnancy test, so it could be interpreted by the women themselves with the help of an app we provide.

How we built it

After extensive research in medical databases we identified the analysis of a combination of two sexual hormones to give the best results in predicting the probability of PCOS. For these two hormones we found specific antibodies, that are commercially available and can be used to develop a lateral flow test. We are now in close contact with companies specialized in the development of these lateral flow tests. We are also in contact with a medical Professor at Hong Kong University who is willing to help us with clinical testing, once our prototype is developed.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we are facing is maintaining and budgeting of limited finance. Despite doing a lot of self-learning of many tasks such as creation of publicity materials (i.e. website creation, video animation with freelance animators), we are currently held back in the development of our prototype due to financial reasons. Despite these challenges and motivated by lots of positive feedbacks we received in multiple health innovation competitions, we are eager to take our idea to the next step, which would be the prototype development.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

1st prize and audience choice award at D.H. Chen Health Innovation Challenge 2019

Audience choice award at the Health Innovation Prize 2020 of Imperial College London

Selected Innovation at WISH 2020 (World Innovation Summit for Health) Spark Competition

What we learned

Through the past competitions our team joined, we improved in communicating our vision of Ovolution. This made us able to get a lot of input from experts of different fields like the sanitary pad industry or biotech companies. We always held intensive internal meetings to take the feedback we got into serious consideration and are continuously striving to improve the concept of Ovolution.

Through a small-scale questionnaire on female patients who had consulted their GPs on PCOS, we also learned a lot about the current situation of PCOS diagnostic in Pakistan. We found out about their needs, their priorities concerning various product characteristics and in many cases, what has stopped them from getting treatment earlier.

What's next for Ovolution

Currently, we are still having meetings with third party lateral flow test manufacturing companies in the US, UK and Germany. We are hoping to find the perfect partner for the development of our first prototype, that can hopefully be implemented in clinical testing in Hong Kong. And after all our biggest goal is to live up to our slogan: Change pads, change lives!