Myra Koesdjojo

In 2005, a 23-year-old man went to a rural Burmese hospital complaining of fever. The malaria diagnosis wasn’t surprising. The disease is common in his district, but recent drug therapies have reduced death rates dramatically. The man took the prescribed medicine, artesunate supposedly made by Guilin Pharmaceutical in China. Doctors expected a full recovery.

Three days later, the patient went into a coma. Despite transfers to two other hospitals and injections of intravenous fluids and more artesunate, he died of cerebral malaria.

Analysis of the drug provided by the first hospital showed that it was a fake. Guilin makes authentic medications, but the active ingredient in the hospital’s supply was acetaminophen. A small amount of artesunate was present, about 20 percent of a normal dose, enough to fool a simple test.

Prototype drug detection system

By some estimates, a third to half of the artesunate in some countries is counterfeit. The World Health Organization has called for faster, more accurate tests, and now a team of Oregon State University chemists has stepped up with an innovative approach. They have created an inexpensive paper-based assay that detects a range of artesunate concentrations by turning shades of yellow in the presence of the drug. In OSU’s new Linus Pauling Science Center, this international team of scientists and students is also developing an affordable diagnostic device that can work with the paper test to pinpoint the amount of an active ingredient in a sample.

“We’re trying to develop a simple, rapid and inexpensive method to detect these counterfeits,” says Myra Koesdjojo, who received her Ph.D. in chemistry from Oregon State in 2009 and now manages OSU professor Vince Remcho’s lab. The native of Indonesia knows what’s at stake. Members of her family have had malaria, a disease that kills as many as 900,000 people a year, most of them children in Africa and south Asia.

Fake drugs not only allow patients to die, they also promote antibiotic resistance. By exposing pathogens to ineffective doses of pharmaceuticals, counterfeits enable disease-causing germs to survive and spread, hastening the day when they can outwit front-line drugs.

Koesdjojo and her team envision a portable testing device the size of a cell phone. Health professionals would be able to test batches of drugs quickly and cheaply. The OSU researchers have already built a prototype using off-the-shelf electrical components and open-source software. In their plans is development of an iPhone app.

Paper-based drug detection strip

“We tried a color sensor with an existing iPhone app,” says Koesdjojo. “It works pretty well. But it’s not built for this purpose. We want to use the same idea and develop our own app.”

The team has even greater ambitions: inexpensive, portable devices to detect environmental pollutants and blood-borne diseases. Koesdjojo says her brother would have benefitted. When he came down with malaria, doctors also treated him for dengue fever because the symptoms are similar and they were unable to perform a more precise test.

“Having these simple tools,” she says, “will eliminate the guessing and enable doctors to treat for the right disease.”

International Research Team
Koesdjojo’s team includes students from Oregon and Asia
Jamy Lee, a sophomore in chemistry from Tigard who received an OSU research grant to work in Koesdjojo’s lab last summer

Michael Neilson, a sophomore from Corvallis in physics

Chadd Armstrong, a senior in chemistry from Oregon who received scholarship support from a fund established by OSU alumna Gretchen Schuette (Ph.D., oceanography, ’80).  The Schuette fund supports transfer students as they acclimate to OSU and contributes to student success by promoting contacts between advisers at community colleges and Oregon State.

Anukul Boonloed (Tony), a Ph.D. student from Thailand who has received support from the Thai government for his research. He is helping to develop a collaboration with Chiang Mai University in Thailand.

Parks Remcho, Corvallis High School

YuanYuan Wu, a Ph.D. student student from Dalian, China

Such networks would offer continuous, real-time health diagnosis, experts say, to reduce the onset of degenerative diseases, save lives and cut health care costs. The ideal monitoring device would be small, worn on the body, low cost, and perhaps draw its energy from something as minor as body heat. But it would be able to transmit vast amounts of health information in real time and help to prevent or treat disease.

Illustration by Teresa Hall

Sounds great in theory, but it’s not easy. If it were, the X Prize Foundation wouldn’t be trying to develop a Tricorder X Prize — inspired by the remarkable instrument of Star Trek fame — that would give $10 million to whomever can create a mobile wireless sensor and give billions of people around the world better access to low-cost, reliable medical monitoring and diagnostics.

“This type of sensing would scale down to the size of a bandage that you could wear around you,” says Chiang, an expert in wireless medical electronics and assistant professor in the OSU School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS).

“The sensor might provide and transmit data on heart health, bone density, blood pressure or insulin status. Ideally, you could not only monitor health issues but also help prevent problems before they happen. Maybe detect arrhythmias, for instance, and anticipate heart attacks. Or, monitor the indoor location of an elderly person or the early onset of cognitive decline. Finally, it needs to be non-invasive and able to provide huge amounts of data while consuming little energy.”

Several startup companies such as Corventis and iRhythm have already entered the cardiac monitoring market.

In the EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, Chiang and his team reported that one of the key obstacles is the energy required to run the device. A type of technology called “ultrawideband” might have that capability if the receiver getting the data were within a “line of sight” and signals were not interrupted by passing through a human body. But even non-line of sight transmission might be possible using ultrawideband if lower transmission rates were required, they found. Collaborating on the research was Huaping Liu, an associate professor in EECS, and clinical researchers at the Oregon Center for Aging and Technology at the Oregon Health & Science University.

Patrick Chiang (Photo courtesy of the College of Engineering)

“The challenges are quite complex, but the potential benefit is huge and of increasing importance with an aging population,” Chiang says. “This is definitely possible. I could see some of the first systems being commercialized within the next three years.”

Chiang’s collaborators on projects to develop non-invasive wireless monitoring devices include colleagues at OSU’s Center for Healthy Aging Research, the Linus Pauling Institute and OHSU in Portland. Chiang also collaborates with researchers at Tsinghua and Fudan universities in China.

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Rachel Robertson contributed to this story.

Online: learn more about Patrick Chiang’s research.

Brian Wilson sorts through tangled wires to isolate a soil moisture sensor at the Andrews Forest. (Photo: Lina DiGregorio)

The science of mountain airsheds requires a strong back as well as a sharp mind — especially when you’re lugging a 65-pound golf-cart battery in your pack.

An interdisciplinary team of OSU students spent 10 weeks this summer scaling the steep slopes of H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest to enable researchers to unplug their high-tech gear — the sensors they use to study the ebb and flow of carbon-laden air through old-growth and second-growth landscapes. Their project, funded by the National Science Foundation, represents a new generation of ultra-low-power sensing devices and novel methods of “harvesting” power that save energy and vastly extend the range of existing equipment in mountainous terrain.

The three seniors — Drew Smith, Erin Wyckoff and Brian Wilson — pooled their individual expertise in electrical engineering, soil science and atmospheric science to test and refine a networked wireless system for monitoring what OSU’s Terra magazine calls the “exhaled byproducts of the forest” (see Grasping for Air). Their goal: to make those monster batteries obsolete in the Andrews. Thanks to their efforts, the miles of electric wire that currently snake through the experimental watershed in glistening black tangles will be relegated to the dustbin of technology.

“Wires are hard to work with,” says Adam Kennedy, the forest science faculty research assistant from Kennewick, Washington, who coordinated the team. “They degrade, animals chew through them, we trip over them. Battery-free wireless sensors offer a promising solution to these limitations. This could totally reshape the design of future research sites.”

For their project, the students used equipment ranging from scrounged (10-year-old temperature sensors scavenged from a professor’s storage cabinet) to super-sophisticated (a shiny new $18,000 soil-sampling machine with a robotic arm). Two or three times a week, they would set out from their labs on campus to the damp coolness of Oregon’s western Cascades. Rising into the lush understory of Watershed 1 is a 120-foot tower of steel that captures air quality data every 15 minutes, sending measurements to a nearby computer. An electronic “net” of other sensors throughout the watershed adds data on sap flow, soil moisture, solar radiation, wind speed and air temperature.

The research is novel in rugged terrain like the Andrews. That’s because most ecosystem sensing work has been done on flat ground, where impediments are fewer. But understanding mountain forests — which cover a significant percent of Earth’s surface — is becoming critical to investigations of climate-change dynamics. “I’m looking at how this research fits into the bigger picture of soil CO2 flux and global warming,” says Wyckoff. “At least 60 percent of Earth’s terrestrial carbon is held in the soil. It’s a huge part of the puzzle.”

Erin Wyckoff, Drew Smith and Brian Wilson (left to right) work together to configure a datalogger that records environmental information in Watershed 1 at the Andrews Forest. (Photo: Lina DiGregorio)

One typical workday in early August, Smith could be seen tapping away at his laptop as he crouched among ferns at the base of the creek bed, reprogramming a custom-fabricated circuit board — the “hub” of the integrated system. Dwarfed by Douglas fir, lulled by the burble of the crystalline stream, dappled by shadows and filtered sunlight, the electrical engineering major from Bozeman, Montana, pored over some 800 lines of computer code while Wilson and Wyckoff trekked the trails, positioning and repositioning the sensors in search of sweet spots that picked up signals. The crackle and pop of their handheld emergency radios broke the forest’s stillness as they communicated back and forth under the green canopy.

The team moved on. After scaling a nearby slope with the speed and agility of a mountain goat, Wyckoff turned her attention to the Andrews’ prized auto-sampler, a state-of-the-art machine that measures carbon flux in soil. The environmental science major from Gresham, Oregon, programmed the “brains” of the machine to work without wires. Instead of tramping across sensitive undergrowth to download data from probes that record moisture, decomposition, soil chemistry and other data, scientists will be able to tap readings remotely through handheld computers such as a BlackBerry or Palm Pilot.

Wilson’s task was to upgrade the Andrews’ air-sensing system, to gather vertical temperature and pressure profiles continuously and in real time. On a clear blue day, the environmental science major who grew up in Portland pumped helium into a bright orange plastic “blimp” the size of a minivan. With paperclips, he attached 10 sensors at intervals along the rope tethering the big balloon to the forest floor. Eventually, he will replace the rope with a fiber-optic temperature-sensing cable to more accurately measure the cold-air drainage that flows down the watershed each evening after the sun goes down.

Once researchers develop robust sensor networks that operate without wires and batteries, they will see a bump in efficiency, a drop in blisters and sweat and a decline in disturbance to the fragile forest ecosystem. With data more readily accessible, the mysteries of mountain forests will be easier to unravel.

Funding Note: The students’ work was made possible by a National Science Foundation REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) supplement to an ongoing interdisciplinary project involving the colleges of Forestry, Engineering and Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences.