AUCians Win Second Place at SensUs Contest

By: Nesrien Abdelkader 

@NesrienAshraf

For the first time, a team of AUC undergraduates beat the odds and won second place in the Analytical Performance Award with their original medical device at this year’s international SensUs competition.

The SensUs competition, held at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands,  challenged 14 multidisciplinary student teams to create an innovative biosensor, a device that uses blood samples to detect chemical substances in blood. This year, students needed to measure Humira, a drug used to relieve pain in rheumatoid arthritis patients.

The Analytical Performance Award assesses how well the device performs and accurately measures the drug.

AUC was one of only two universities from the global East to take part in the competition, the other being China’s Zhejiang University. They were also the only team to be selected from all of Africa and the Middle East to compete against top technological universities globally.

“Winning the award was recognition of the hard work we’ve done for the past year. It shows how well students from AUC can compete in terms of science and major competitions,” said team member and recent AUC graduate Omar El-Sayyad, who began working on the project as an undergraduate.

Students from several different majors including chemistry, mechanical engineering and computer science make up the team.

They worked together for one year prior to the competition to develop their biosensor.

The team members, all selected based on their abilities, included Laila El-Feky, Omar El-Sayyad, Omar Khoshala, Dania Abdeldayem, Ghada Adly, Asser Hangal, Habiba Tarek, Karim Rafik, Mohab Amr and Namir Elkhouly.

“I do not see any other educational or learning exercise that matches this experience. Its unparalleled,” said Chairman of the Chemistry Department Hassan Azzazy, who served as the team mentor.

The competition was not just a test of building skills, but also an opportunity for students to learn how to create practical medical devices that could be used in a startup business, Azzazy explained.

It wasn’t just about developing a working biosensor, but also about making sure that it was affordable and realistic, said El-Sayyad.

“We want to develop our device until it becomes market-ready and can be used as a point-of-care device,” said Abdeldayem, chemistry senior and team member.

But the team did not expect to win any awards, Azzazy said.

“I personally doubted that we would win the Analytical Award, which is the hardest to win. I mean, we were competing against huge universities like Imperial [College London] and [University of] Glasgow,” said Abdeldayem.

It was a shock to hear their names announced for the award but that quickly changed to jubilation and a sense of euphoria.

“As the only team from the Middle East and Africa, I am extremely happy that we managed to come back home with this significant award. I am very proud that I could represent Egypt and win an award in the name of our country,” Abdeldayem said.

The difficulties that the team faced made their win all the more impressive.

They agreed that one of the greatest obstacles they had to overcome was the difficulty in getting the materials they needed delivered to Egypt.

“Other countries have access to everything. We are competing with teams that can get things they need by the next morning. In our case, we needed at least two or three weeks to get anything we were missing,” said Azzazy.

Abdeldayem also added that researching and implementing electrochemistry, a branch of chemistry that deals with electricity and its relationship with chemical changes, also presented a unique challenge.

“The big challenge here was the fact that the electrochemistry we worked with was quite advanced and all of us were undergraduates and we didn’t learn this in our undergraduate chemistry classes. We had to learn and research a lot,” she said.

This is the third year that AUC has competed in the SensUs competition. In 2018, the AUC team got the most votes from the public on their performance which earned them the Public Inspiration Award.

Azzazy and his team are already in preparation for next year and looking to expand their team.

He said he wants to include even more diverse members and for that, he is looking for business students to help successfully get the biosensors on the market.