What is the name of your organization?
The OpenFlexure Project
What is the name of your solution?
OpenFlexure Microscope
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
A locally manufactured high performance digital microscope and slide scanner for medical diagnostics.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Bath
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
United Kingdom
What type of organization is your solution team?
Nonprofit
Film your elevator pitch.
—
What specific problem are you solving?
We are working to enable universal access to diagnostic microscopy. This is crucial to treatment of diseases like malaria (200M cases/600,000 deaths annually) and cancer (500,000 deaths annually in Africa). Our Solution will enable local manufacturing and maintenance of automated microscopes, delivering better diagnostics in a sustainable way.
What is your solution?
The OpenFlexure Microscope is an automated microscope that digitises patient samples to enable better record-keeping, quality control, and access to expert pathologists for small health facilities. It can be manufactured by a growing network of local engineers across the Global South, using easily-sourced components and 3D printed parts. OpenFlexure is shared under a fully open license that ensures control and ownership are retained by local teams. Local production of microscopes results in more robust medical supply chains, better availability of maintenance and spare parts, and retention of healthcare spending within the growing economies of the Global South. The OpenFlexure project is poised to realise these benefits for microscopy, and once successful will pave the way for a growing range of essential diagnostic technologies to be democratised.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
The primary beneficiaries of the OpenFlexure Microscope are patients in underfunded settings, particularly in the Global South, where access to basic diagnostic tests is often limited. Patients may be forced to travel long distances, clinicians may rely on damaged or improvised equipment, or treatment may be given presumptively based only on symptoms. These challenges lead to delays, misdiagnosis, and avoidable deaths.
The OpenFlexure Microscope provides high-quality, context-appropriate digital diagnostics that are locally certified, manufactured, and maintained. It has applications in malaria diagnosis (a disease that kills over 600,000 people annually) and has also the diagnosis of cancer which causes around 500,000 deaths per year in sub-Saharan Africa. Early diagnosis dramatically improves outcomes.
If we can enable locally certified production in the Global South clinicians will benefit from automated slide scanning, saving time and reducing workload. Deployment at the point of care reduces delays, costs, and risks associated with sample transport, while enabling telepathology in low-resource settings with unreliable power or internet.
Digital slide archives support secure record keeping and medical training. Local manufacturing enables local servicing, vastly improving equipment uptime and lifetime while also creating skilled jobs in the local economy.
