Stanford bioengineers develop a 20-cent, hand-powered centrifuge

From the point of view of technical specifications, we can match

cent

rifuges that cost between $1,000 and $5,000. But this is a tool that does not require electricity or infrastructure. You can carry them in your pockets for a price of 0.20 dollars. We call it a paper leak. It's essentially a piece of paper, and we put in little capillary vessels that we can fill with blood. And we have standard rope. And we take two pieces of PVC pipe or wooden

hand

les. And then you just pull it gently. As it rotates, the disc spins back and forth. It is rotating oscillatingly.

And there is a moment where the disc is stationary and then it starts to unwind and go in the other direction as a force is applied. With this set of principles, we can essentially make a

cent

rifuge that spins up to 120,000 RPM and 30,000 G of force. In the laboratory we can separate and extract malaria parasites from the blood. We can separate filaria, African sleeping sickness, separate blood plasma. It is an ultra-low-cost

centrifuge

built from the principles of a very old toy: the whirligig. This is a toy I used to play with when I was a child. The conundrum was that he didn't know how fast this would spin.

So I got intrigued and set this up on a high speed camera. And I couldn't believe what I saw. This thing, when you heard the noise, was actually going between 10,000 and 15,000 RPM. To me, that seemed like what we really wanted: to make a

centrifuge

. Before us, no one had really understood how this toy works. So we spent a significant portion of this time really understanding the mathematical phase space of how linear motion can be converted to rotational motion. And there is some beautiful mathematics hidden inside this object. There is value in this whimsical nature of looking for solutions, because it really forces us to step outside of our own set of limitations on what a product should really look like.

The centrifuge is the workhorse of any laboratory, from diagnostics to biology. And if you build a very essential key instrument, then you'll open yourself up to a whole different variety of applications. We just returned from Madagascar. We take the tool to the field to work with health workers. And we are initiating a larger scale clinical validation trial to share with the community and healthcare providers and get feedback. So it's a very iterative cycle. There are about a billion people around the world who live without any infrastructure, without roads or electricity. So for us, the inspiration is to create the simplest possible tools that do the job well, so we can distribute them around the world.

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.edu.