I just started my internship with PATH, a global health nonprofit headquartered in Seattle. For the last 40 odd years, PATH has designed and disseminated a range of tools to improve lives of those living in extreme poverty‒people who earn less than $1.25 a day, many of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa. Although most of the work at PATH is technology-oriented and includes vaccines, drugs, devices, and diagnostics to treat, prevent, and detect diseases, a key part of what PATH does involves ensuring that these tools are available to the people who need them the most.

In Africa, PATH works to limit the impact of HIV and AIDS, to reliably deliver refrigerated vaccines to places with limited infrastructure, and to improve maternal, neonatal, and pediatric health (Figure 1). To that end, I will be working on a chemical heater for an HIV diagnostic test with a small team oat PATH. The project, which has been developed over several years, seeks to commercialize a nucleic acid-based test for HIV, which is especially important to diagnose infants born to HIV-positive mothers because extant tests cause false positives.

I’m super excited by this opportunity to intern at PATH and I look forward to learning more about global health and the role of the nonprofit sector in this field. I’m especially glad to be involved in the manufacturing stage of this project because this bridges the small-scale labwork with which I’m familiar with the dissemination of healthcare technologies to the developing world.

 

Figure 1: A map showing PATH offices around the world. Much of PATH’s fieldwork occurs in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.