Cervic-o

Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer in women worldwide, causing roughly 266,000 deaths a year. High-risk HPV strains drive most cases, but they are highly treatable when caught early. The challenge is screening at scale, especially in low-resource settings.

Cervic-o proposed a microfluidic, point-of-care device that detects p16INK4a, a protein marker linked to HPV's oncogenic activity, as a complement to HPV DNA testing. The intended use case is to triage the false positives that DNA testing can produce, especially in younger women, without requiring a full lab infrastructure.

The project is no longer continuing as a BioDesign team, but the assay concept and the microfluidics design notes are documented for future teams interested in cancer screening at the point of care.