Reem Al Olaby (second from the left) along with her team

The American University in Cairo student Reem Al Olaby and a team of research colleagues were named as one of the top three groups recognized at the fourth annual Novartis Biotechnology Leadership Camp in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Al Olaby and her team created a device that will allow hospitals to screen patients to detect allergies to medications, greatly increasing the accuracy, patient safety and cost effectiveness of drug treatment.

“Current methodologies for drug allergy screening do not achieve high sensitivity and specificity, and the more accurate methods are expensive and time-consuming,” Al Olaby explains. “All of this makes drug allergy prediction not widely applied in clinical practice,” she adds. Each year in the United States, more than 400,000 patients suffer allergic reactions to prescription drugs, causing 5000 deaths and generating medical expenses spent of $10 billion annually.

“I hope we could have the opportunity one day to see this product being used in all hospitals, massively decreasing the risk of drug allergy,” adds Al Olaby, who received five recommendations from the founder of BioCamp and other colleagues from Australia, Canada, USA and India.

Sixty graduate students from 27 countries participated at the biotechnology camp at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research headquarters.  “This competition made me blend with great minds from different countries of the world and it really increased my pool of relationships,” explains Al Olaby.   Al Olaby, who is working on a master’s degree in biotechnology, created a video that highlights the intercultural enrichment she enjoyed as part of the event.

Al Olaby will travel to the United States later this month to start the bioinformatics part of her thesis, which focuses on designing a vaccine against Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) using a new technique that was only used against cancer.  She will travel under the supervision of her advisor Hassan Azzazy, chair of the chemistry department at AUC, Rod Balhorn, UC Davis, and Arthur Olso, Scripps Research Institute, with the support of The Nadhmi Auchi Fellowship for Young Arab Leaders.