February 27, 2002

A Sharon woman races time to realize her goal of aiding health in poor countries

By JESSICA FARGEN
The Patriot Ledger

Alynne MacLean quit her $76,000-a-year job, cashed in her stock options at the biotech firm where she worked and decided to take a year or two off.  She turned down the heat in her Sharon home to 62 degrees to save money, went from rarely going to movies and out to eat to never doing either and has lived frills-free and salary-free for more than a year.

She quit her job at Biogen in Cambridge in December 2000 and two months later incorporated Science With a Mission, a nonprofit organization she had wanted to start since she was a student at Gordon College in Wenham.

MacLean, 38, is driven by her Christian faith and says her mission is simple: Develop low-tech diagnostic tests that are affordable, simple and easy to use for mass screenings for diseases in developing countries.

MacLean’s dream is to develop these low-tech diagnostic tools as a way to reduce the millions of deaths worldwide each year from diseases such as malaria that have been nearly eradicated in highly developed countries such as the United States.  But the days she can go without a full-time job are numbered.

MacLean has given herself until the end of this year to get enough money to sustain Science With a Mission before she will scale back and possibly have to fold the organization. She has raised only $6,000 so far.  Simply put, her goal through Science With a Mission is to take high-tech diagnostic procedures and make them much lower tech.

She is focusing her work on an immunoassay - a complex test based on chemical reactions with antibodies from animals. The test is simpler and easier to use than electricity-based methods used in the United States.

MacLean has a doctorate in bio-analytical chemistry from the University of Kentucky and has 13 years’ experience working with immunoassays.  She is seeking a test that needs no instruments powered by electricity, or any work in a lab or hospital. That would make it useful in developing countries, where diseases often go undiagnosed because of sub par medical facilities. She plans to focus her work on the Caribbean and Central America because they are closer and cheaper and easier to visit.  “People who live in areas with no hospital, no clinic - they have children and relatives dying and they never know from what,” MacLean said.

The test she is developing works like a home pregnancy test. Blood or urine is tested with a small dipstick, and if you are positive for a disease, the dipstick turns blue; if you aren’t, it stays white. Each test is disease-specific, which means that she can’t develop one catch-all test.

Kevin Symmons, who is on the board of directors of Science With a Mission, said he believes MacLean’s diagnostics can reach millions of people if she can keep up the effort.  “Many governmental agencies, nonprofits and religious organizations give huge amounts of medicine and send missionaries, but what they don’t have is diagnostics,” said Symmons, former president of Symmons Industries of Braintree.  “You can send all the vaccines in the world, but unless you know this person unequivocally has it you can’t treat them. We will call it the diagnostic gap.”

MacLean’s first project is a test for acute glomerulonephritis and similar kidney diseases that doctors in the Dominican Republic believe have been infecting and killing people there. She hopes to have it ready sometime in 2003.

MacLean said tests similar to hers are available on a small, scattered scale.  Until recently, her work would have been useless because countries did not have adequate pharmaceuticals even if a disease was diagnosed, she said.  But in recent years drug companies have become more philanthropic and the World Health Organization has developed an “Essential Drug List” as a guideline for countries.

David Brandling-Bennett, deputy director of the Pan-American Health Organization at the World Health Organization, said there is always room for better diagnostics.  “One often would like to have a simpler means of diagnosing common and important illnesses,” he said. “Especially if you could do that without using electricity or fancy lab equipment and with something that is fairly rapid to do so you get an answer in a few minutes.”  Diseases nearly eradicated in the Western world still kill thousands worldwide each day. Malaria, for example, kills at least a million people each year - about 3,000 a day. Early diagnosis can prevent contamination and death, Brandling-Bennett said.  Tuberculosis drugs cost about $10 per patient, but an untreated person can infect between 10 to 15 people a year, according to the World Health Organization.

The need is there and the drugs are available. Now, MacLean’s biggest problem is finding enough time for important lab research, grant-writing and promotion.  She has received more than $6,000 since July, but that isn’t enough to keep it going.

If she goes back to work, she may not have enough time for Science With a Mission. She said few grants in this country provide money for projects aimed primarily to benefit people outside the United States. On top of that, many corporations and foundations have already given large donations to Sept. 11 funds.

MacLean runs her organization from a small home office cluttered with her karate trophies, a rock collection and books.  She teaches Sunday school at Covenant Congregational Church in Easton, is on the national executive board of the Evangelical Covenant Church and volunteers for Compassion International, a child-sponsorship organization.  She tutors teenagers, including four Sudanese refugees, and has a 19-year-old Sudanese girl staying with her. 

She said her faith is what has kept her and Science With a Mission going.  “It’s my Christianity that causes me to care about the people all over the world,” she said. “I have been blessed much in my life, and this is a way I can give back to others.”  She said Science With a Mission has been something she has wanted to do since her first missionary trip in Costa Rica, while she was in college.

“That was the first time I had ever seen how other people live,” she said. “I wanted to help those people. I didn’t want to go back to my nice life and forget.”