From their first day of biology classes at Emory University, freshmen Rostam Zafari and Brian Goldstone have defied expectations.

During class, Professor Rachelle Spell jokingly issued the class a challenge she didn’t expect anyone to fulfill: find a better way to test for Ebola. But Zafari and Goldstone did just that and came up with the idea for Rapid Ebola Detection Strips.

Now, Zafari and Goldstone’s work with REDS is rapidly moving forward. On Oct. 12 their Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign reached its fundraising goal of $14,500. Next week they’ll get into a lab to run tests and work on optimizing REDS to conditions in West Africa. They hope to have a viable prototype by late December and be ready to ship the kits by January.

Their project uses strips to test for Ebola, similar to strips that are currently used to test blood sugar for diagnosing urinary tract infections. Existing Ebola tests usually require expensive machinery and necessitate patients being moved from rural areas into urban hospitals, a practice that perversely spreads the disease further.

Zafari and Goldstone met the first day of classes and bonded over their shared hobby of wrestling. “We started out as wrestling partners and then we became business partners,” Zafari said. He said that his and Goldstone’s natural competitiveness as wrestlers led them to take Spell’s challenge to heart.

But Zafari had other reasons for taking the challenge seriously. One of his best friends, Abraham Pishevar, had recently died in a plane crash on the day Pishevar began classes as a freshman at Case Western Reserve University.

“He was one of my closest friends,” Zafari said. “We both wrestled, we’re both Iranian-American, we had very close connections.” He described his friend as an “absolutely inspiring” and “selfless” student who was committed to social justice and wanted to help people through the medical field. The loss, he said, was “absolutely tragic and arbitrary and unnecessary, but that’s kind of what helped me fuel this project.”

Zafari said the death of his friend put him in a frame of mind to take his professor’s joking challenge very seriously.

“I was not in a good space, and had a lot of energy and anger that I wanted to funnel to something similar to death, because that’s what I was pissed off at the time, and Ebola now is killing so many people that I kind of saw that as death itself,” he said.

He channeled his anger and grief at his own loss into an attempt to keep others from dying and is working on REDS as a way to honor his friend. “Everything REDS does is in honor and memory of Abraham Pishevar,” he said.

Zafari, who returned to campus Monday after visiting Pishevar’s mother in Maryland, is back to work on REDS, a project that he spends three to five hours a day on, he said.

The strips used in their project would be quicker than existing tests, as well. Though Zafari and Goldstone will not be sure until they begin testing REDS in the lab next week, they hope the tests could yield results in an hour or less.

The biggest challenge, Zafari said, is optimizing the strips’ accuracy. In addition, they want to make REDS affordable as possible — they hope to make each kit, which would contain 25–50 strips, around 10 dollars.

Zafari said the medical community has not come up with a test like REDS yet because Ebola has been seen as a West African problem, not a humanitarian problem.

“Since 1970 there (have) been five outbreaks. This could’ve been addressed and the outbreaks could’ve been prevented happening if earlier actions were taken, if Ebola was taken seriously sooner,” he said.

As laboratory testing begins next week, Zafari and Goldstone will work on making their vision of quick, portable and affordable Ebola test strips a reality. Zafari stressed that he and Goldstone both believe in responding to the humanitarian crises of Ebola in whatever way they can. They’re committed to raising awareness of the disease, he said, regardless of how the tests turn out.

Published on October 23, 2014 at 12:01 am

Contact Maggie: mmcregan@syr.edu