Rob Cunningham and Samuel Farnum’s ParaSight provides a low-cost pathology microscope and rapid diagnoses through a cloud-based diagnosis-as-a-service system to help in the battle against malaria.
Every year, over 200 million people contract malaria, resulting in over 500,000 deaths. An overwhelming majority of these cases are confined to the African continent, which accounts for over 90% of cases and fatalities associated with malaria.
According to the World Health Organization, a large part of the problem is the lack of early diagnosis. And here, there are two real limiting factors.
Proper diagnosis requires pathology-grade microscopes, which could cost more than $10,000. It would also need trained experts with about 10 years of experience to analyse and confirm the threat of malaria.
Two recent Western graduates are hoping to solve both problems through their venture, ParaSight.
Over the past two years, Robin Cunningham, BESc’24, BSc’24 and Samuel Farnum, BESc’24, HBA ’24, have been working on developing a product and service accessible to those at the frontlines of the battle against malaria.
ParaSight is developing a microscope that uses proprietary embedded image processing technology to enhance the resolution of blood sample images. This allows ParaSight to utilize inexpensive lenses to capture images but then reconstruct them to the standard required to spot malaria parasites (1-μm resolution).
But seeing an image and medically diagnosing it are two different challenges. Given the constraints on the availability of experts across some regions of Africa where the needs are most vital, ParaSight is building a cloud-based diagnosis service that can leverage artificial intelligence, and reconfirm findings with a global network of medical experts.
While Cunningham and Farnum have used their expertise as engineers with an interest in business to push ParaSight forward, the technology wing is spearheaded by Dr. Ian Cunningham, whose research in Uganda formed the foundation of the start-up, and Justin Yang, BMSc'23, who is the mastermind behind the imaging technology.
It’s about 50 times cheaper and 50 times faster than existing solutions… it requires no training and can generate a diagnosis for patients within minutes.
Robin Cunningham, BESc’24, BSc’24
And those are the kind of numbers that can change facts on the ground.
Partnering on ParaSight
Cunningham and Farnum are engineers to the core. They both have had a deep fascination with entrepreneurship, and credit Western’s Engineering program for opening up many opportunities to stretch those creative muscles.
The two London locals actually met at London Central Secondary School but were simply acquaintances until 2nd year of university.
Soon after becoming close friends, they were plugged into the work Dr. Cunningham and Yang were pursuing with ParaSight. But having great technology doesn’t make it an entrepreneurial venture. Cunningham and Farnum knew that a business approach was essential to getting ParaSight out to the communities who needed it.
Working on the business, Cunningham and Farnum won a spot at the prestigious Ivey Business Plan Competition with a competitive group of student entrepreneurs. Cunningham notes that the feedback from experienced entrepreneurs and investors was worth more than the $20,000 on offer at the competition.
They were also accepted into the Western Accelerator, where the importance of talking to customers was again reconfirmed.
We get subject to our own biases a lot, but you can learn so much valuable information from just talking to customers.
Samuel Farnum, BESc’24, HBA ’24
This process has also opened the discussion of who might those customers might be.
ParaSight’s initial targets are major companies in manufacturing and mining that provide healthcare to workers and their families. They own the clinical infrastructure in many of the mining towns strewn across Subsaharan Africa.
Then there are smaller clinics in rural regions that don’t have access to the technology or the expertise ParaSight offers.
Cunningham and Farnum have also discovered that many middle and upper-middle-class families might consider purchasing ParaSight to test for malaria at home.
“Just like you may have a first aid kit if you get a cut, people said that they would buy a ParaSight just to put a sample of blood when they get a fever,” said Cunningham.
The next few months are critical for Cunningham and Farnum.
They are currently working on getting the ParaSight approved by Health Canada as a Class 1 medical device. This certification will speed up the certification process in the countries they wish to operate in.
This summer, they will be testing ParaSight with malaria-infected blood samples from the University of Toronto.
Meanwhile, the team is also working on building out a network of medical professionals and pathologists who can work with their diagnostic applications to confirm cases of malaria, adding a second confirmation tool to ParaSight’s machine learning system.
And the potential for impacting even more lives doesn’t stop with malaria. Cunningham and Farnum have begun discussions with experts on applying ParaSight’s computational microscope and diagnostic tools to detect other blood-borne diseases like tuberculosis, sickle-cell disease, and schistosomiasis.
By vastly improving the image resolutions on affordable microscopes, ParaSight might make good on the promise that a drop of blood could change everything.