Ph.D. Student Robert Mannino Developing Novel Diagnostic Tool for Anemia — and Testing it on Himself Robert Mannino, 25, was diagnosed with anemia at six months of age, and needs blood transfusions every three to four weeks. His Ph.D. project is focused on perfecting a diagnostic tool that works with a smartphone camera. It’s a non-invasive, home test for anemia, and he’s already tested it on himself. “Rob is basically devoting his Ph.D. work to his own disease, and everyone grasped not just the novelty of that, but the importance of it,” says Mannino’s advisor, Wilbur Lam, assistant professor of pediatrics and biomedical engineering in the Coulter Department. “The longer it’s been since my last blood transfusion, the more anemic I get,” he explains. “So I tracked myself over the course of a transfusion cycle, about a month.” One day each week, he’d take a picture of one of his fingernails, then draw blood. “I wanted to see I could come up with a relationship between the fingernail colors and the actual results of the blood test,” he says. “So, after one cycle, over the course of about a month, I was able to find color values in my fingernail that matched up pretty well with my dropping hemoglobin levels.” Your color comes into play at the doctor’s office during an examination for anemia. “The doctor is going to look at how pale
you are, your fingernails, lips and eyes, looking for indications of some sort of anemia,” Mannino says. “If you see me everyday, it might be hard to pick up on a color difference. But the cameras in our phones are getting so sophisticated. This is a procedure that would use existing technology.” Globally, anemia affects about 1.6 billion people. “It’s a symptom of many diseases, of malnourishment, of vitamin deficiency. A lot of different people are affected or potentially could be,” Mannino says. And a lot of those people have more access to a smartphone they do to a physician’s office. Mannino plans to spend his time developing a system that will let a person take a picture of their fingernail, then spit out information about hemoglobin levels. “Then they can go see a doctor,” Mannino says. “We’re working on the app to make that happen. Ideally, by the time I graduate I’d like this to be something that other people can actually download and use.”
Bridging Pediatric Care and Engineering Research When his laboratory works on challenging research problems, Dr. Wilbur Lam can easily envision how the solutions will help children with cancer or blood disorders. That’s because the issues he studies spring from patients he sees as a physician specializing in pediatric hematology and oncology at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Lam holds both an M.D. and a Ph.D. and splits his time between the Emory University campus and Georgia Tech, where he’s an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. “We’re interested in the cellular biophysics of blood, and we often need to make our own devices to study blood cells and the diseases that alter them,” Lam said. “We do basic science as well as translational research, but it all begins and ends in the clinic with patients.” Lam has many research interests, but some of his lab’s biggest successes have been medical devices. One, called AnemoCheck, was invented by Erika Tyburski when she was an undergraduate at Georgia Tech; its ability to measure anemia was then evaluated in clinical trials at Emory. The other, Cellscope Oto, attaches to smartphones and allows parents to send snapshots of their child’s eardrums to an on-call physician who can determine whether a midnight earache merits immediate attention.
BME Healthreach Program As part of Dr. Lam’s NSF CAREER grant, BME Healthreach, a K-12 outreach program, was created. The program teaches math and science to hospitalized children using their own disease as the motivation and springboards for learning. Undergraduate students from the BME Department at Georgia Tech create interactive teaching modules following Georgia educational standards for math and science directed towards in-patient and clinic children at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta–Egleston hospital.
The Imlay Foundation provided a $5 million grant to Georgia Tech and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta to develop new therapies for pediatrics. The grant from the Imlay Foundation is the largest in its 25-year history.