a 17-year-old volunteer saw what dialysis patients were going through in a hospital. from her home, she built a machine that costs 60 times less than conventional ones. 🩺
Anya Pogharian was 17 years old and a first-year student at Marianopolis College in Quebec, Canada, when she decided to volunteer at the dialysis unit at the General Hospital of Montreal.
There she saw up close something that marked her: patients with kidney failure, tied to very long sessions, dependent on machines that cost more than $30,000 and that only exist in hospitals.
In countries like India and Pakistan, Anya later said, 90% of patients who need dialysis simply die for not having access to the treatment. Preventable deaths.
She decided to try to solve it herself, as a project for her science class. She studied technical manuals of dialysis machines she found on the internet, and began to look for affordable and open-source electronic components.
Working in her spare time, with minimal supervision from specialists, she built a functional prototype in just four months, using recycled and surplus medical parts.
The result: a portable machine, the size of a briefcase, capable of performing the essential functions of a dialyser, with a total cost of just $500-600 — up to 60 times less than a conventional machine.
In laboratory tests with contaminated real human blood, the device achieved a complete reduction in impurities in short sessions.
“The machine acts like an artificial kidney to filter the blood,” Anya explained about its operation. Her invention earned her awards at science fairs and an invitation to university laboratories to continue perfecting it.
Sometimes the greatest inequality in modern medicine is not solved in a pharmaceutical laboratory, but in the basement of a teenager’s house who decided not to accept it as normal.
