Ivy Tech of South Bend in the Community College Innovation Challenge

Congratulations to the Community College Innovation Challenge (CCIC) team from Ivy Tech Community College in South Bend. This is the second time Ivy Tech students have made it to the finals in the CCIC.  The first time was in 2015 with Betadataquantadata, a hand-held biosensor for coliphage.
 
Teams from InnovATEBIO programs have done well in this competition before with teams from Del Mar College and Los Angeles Mission College making it to the finals.

This year's Team Members: Pamela Arenas, Rena Doss, Josef Martin, Sarah Alfadhi, George Twaddle (Mentor)

Project:  VirusScan - The Pandemic Defender
 

The United States’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated many shortcomings in our country’s public health preparedness and left many Americans in a state of concern about their health and the health and wellness of their communities. A number of significant liabilities in our current testing schemes have interfered with our response such as delays in the reporting of results, high costs, and distribution systems vulnerable to supply side shortages. These liabilities have been compounded with potential “false-negatives” results, complicating the decision of Americans to quarantine. Our proposed solution is “ViruScan,” a fast, accurate hand-held test-strip device with which any concerned person can screen themselves for the presence of a pandemic virus. Our device is designed to be low-cost and to reliably detect virus infections in minutes. ViruScan will also report test results over a HIPAA compliant network to public health authorities enabling a real-time response to a spreading pandemic. Our test promises a revolutionary new approach to testing in that we have designed it to be reconfigured to detect our next pandemic threat. To learn more about how ViruScan works and how we propose to confront the next pandemic, visit our team: the “Indiana Pandemic Hunters.”