Harvard Innovation Labs Companies – i-lab – Aldatu Biosciences – 2/43

Aldatu Biosciences

Aldatu’s affordable drug resistance diagnostics matches HIV patients with effective drugs and saves resource-limited healthcare systems money.

Website

http://www.aldatubio.com/

A former postdoctoral fellow with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health AIDS Initiative, virologist Iain MacLeod in 2014 cofounded Aldatu Biosciences, which provides sensitive and cost-effective diagnostics to detect drug resistance in antiretroviral treatments for HIV. The first drug-resistance test designed specifically for use in Africa, it can be stored at room temperature and provides results in two hours—compared with current methods that require refrigeration and take two to three days. In 2014, Aldatu Biosciences won the Harvard University’s Deans’ Health and Life Sciences Challenge and was later awarded $1.5 million by the National Institutes of Health to develop its diagnostic method. MacLeod spoke recently with Harvard Public Health editor Madeline Drexler.