News: Press Releases

Pointcare Honored as 2006 Tech Museum Awards Laureate

September 21, 2006

The Tech Museum of Innovation, one of the country’s leading science and technology museums, today named PointCare Technologies a 2006 Tech Museum Awards Laureate.

The Tech Museum of Innovation, located in San Jose, Calif., named 25 Laureates for the prestigious Tech Museum Awards Program, which celebrates those who leverage new and existing technologies to benefit humanity. The Laureates were selected from among 951 entries representing 98 countries by program partner, Santa Clara University’s Center for Science, Technology, and Society.

PointCare, one of the five finalists in the health category sponsored by Agilent Technologies Foundation, was named for its invention and development of a portable, CD4 T-cell enumerating flow cytometer for monitoring AIDS treatment in rural areas of the developing world. PointCare created new optical technology using metallic nanoparticles that eliminates the cost, complexity and fragility of traditional methods. Caregivers with no previous laboratory training can operate the system and produce immediate results at the patient’s side.

“We are honored to receive this highly prestigious award,” said Peter Hansen, PointCare’s chief science officer. “Our customers and the HIV/AIDS patients they serve live in difficult circumstances where diagnostic systems designed for the predictable environments of the industrialized world cannot be deployed. Becoming a Tech Award Laureate recognized our PointCare staff that worked hard to change this.”

The PointCare technology addresses a serious problem in HIV/AIDS patient management by providing a robust, easy-to-use system for CD4 positive lymphocyte counting that is especially relevant for the rural environments where two-thirds of the world's 50 million HIV patients live.

Today’s antiretroviral drugs (ARV’s) are 90 percent effective in putting patients into remission and they are available at low cost worldwide through various initiatives, but ARV’s only succeed when therapy is available and timed according to the patient’s individualized CD4 positive lymphocyte count. In the past, all CD4 lymphocyte counting equipment has been designed for environments with a highly developed infrastructure and has required very skilled operators to prepare blood samples by hand, using complex reagents and laboratory equipment, and then interpret the data.

To operate the AuRICA flow cytometry system by PointCare, the user loads a capped whole blood tube drawn directly from the patient and presses “Run” on a touch screen and is then free to attend to the patient or other matters. Numerical results are automatically ready and presented in 15 minutes. The system reagents are heat-tolerant and can be stored without refrigeration; the equipment is portable and can be set up, installed and ready for samples in one-half hour; and it can operate from 24-volt DC power. This PointCare technology now makes CD4 counting so simple and cost-effective that it can potentially serve every AIDS patient in the world.

PointCare Technologies currently has AuRICA flow cytometers in Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, Haiti, Zambia, Nigeria, Canada and Malawi. For more information about PointCare Technologies, please visit www.pointcare.net.

The Tech Museum awards are to be presented Nov. 15, at the Tech Museum Awards Gala.

In addition to the 25 Laureates being honored, Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will be presented with the 2006 James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award.

“The Tech Museum Awards, presented by Applied Materials, Inc., are an incredibly important way to call attention to some of the most meaningful innovations in science and technology in the world, and to the often unsung heroes behind them,” said Peter Friess, president of The Tech Museum. “The Laureates who we honor serve as great role models to future generations of inventors and engineers, and their work reminds us that innovation can be applied in profound ways to benefit humanity and the world.”

James Koch, executive director of the Global Social Benefit Incubator at Santa Clara University’s Center for Science, Technology and Society commented, “Each year’s award submissions give us a glimpse at global trends and issues that we might not have had insight into otherwise.” Koch further noted that the prevalence of East/West alliances between Europe, North America and Asia have been replaced with North/South alliances linking developed countries of the Northern Hemisphere and developing nations of the Southern Hemisphere.

Sponsors of the five Tech Museum Award categories are: Intel for the Environment Award; Accenture for the Economic Development Award; Microsoft for the Education Award; Agilent Technologies Foundation for the Health Award; and the Swanson Foundation for the Katherine M. Swanson Equality Award.

Program sponsors include Wells Fargo, KPMG, Celerity, Cadence, Genentech, The Skoll Foundation, Santa Clara Valley National Bank, Hewlett-Packard, NBC11, The San Jose Mercury News, American Airlines and The Fairmont San Jose. For more information about The Tech Museum Awards, visit www.techawards.org.

About The Tech Museum of Innovation

The Tech Museum of Innovation is an interactive technology and science experience. Located in San Jose, California – the Capital of Silicon Valley – its mission, as a public-benefit corporation, is to inspire the innovator in everyone. Through hands-on exhibits, educational programs, the annual Tech Challenge student team competition, and the internationally recognized Tech Museum Awards, presented by Applied Materials, Inc., The Tech Museum of Innovation honors the past, celebrates the present, and encourages the development of innovative ideas for a more promising future. For more information about The Tech Museum of Innovation, visit The Tech.org.