Botswana International University of Science and Technology
Botswana
Read more about the Project!Problem Statement
Highly infectious diseases like Tuberculosis (TB) and other pulmonary diseases continue to be the leading causes of death in many African countries despite the availability of drugs for treatment. This is because, in many cases, the diagnosis is done late. Dr. Chimowa’s research investigates the application of advanced nanomaterials as gas sensors of vapors in the human breath as an alternative fast and non-invasive technology for rapid disease diagnosis.
Progress Highlights
So far, a research group dedicated to breath analysis has been established, which is furnished with new equipment and research personnel in the form of post-graduate students. We also designed and made our own automated gas sensing station at less than 20 % of the cost of commercial systems.
Key Findings
We managed to find new Volatile organic compounds unique to Tuberculosis (TB) and multi-drug-resistant TB, which will enable us to design appropriate devices for their diagnosis.
Potential Impact
The work promises to radically change the way TB and Lung Cancer are diagnosed, by introducing a novel technique that is cost effective and rapid. The project will also trained six post-graduate students, and thus increasing human capacity development in Africa.
Summary
Highly infectious diseases like Tuberculosis (TB) and other pulmonary diseases continue to be the leading causes of death in many African countries despite the availability of drugs for treatment. This is because in many cases the diagnosis is done late. Dr Chimowa’s research will investigate the application of advanced nanomaterials as gas sensors of vapours in human breath as an alternative fast and non-invasive technology for rapid diseases diagnosis.
Grantee Description
Dr George Chimowa is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the Botswana International University of Science and Technology, in Botswana. He obtained his Ph.D. in Physics, from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2015, where he studied the quantum AC transport of Nanomaterials. He went on to do two post-doctoral fellowships at CSIR and CNRS in South Africa and France respectively.
Dr Chimowa’s long-term aspiration is to continuously expand and exploit new nanoscience to develop technologies that solve global problems in the medical field. His hope is that the current technology being developed can be extended to future viral disease diagnosis. He aims to advance this research of disease diagnosis and monitoring using human breath and will in the process train young African scientists and conduct research informing policy decisions to improve human health.
Project: Advanced Nanomaterials for disease diagnosis using human breath
This project aims at developing a new class of carbon-based nanomaterials and their composites that will be used as resistive gas sensors of volatile organic compounds that are found in human breath. Human breath is known to contain volatile organic compounds (VOCs) some of which are biomarkers of specific diseases. By identifying these VOCs, Dr Chimowa hopes to be able to develop an alternative technique for disease diagnosis that is rapid and non-invasive. This technology will in the long term lower the health budgets of most Southern African countries that have a high TB burden.
