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The Prenatal Marker Pen ain’t garbage

How a great new invention is saving babies' lives Published by Tom Hall on August 17, 2012 The caption for the article’s photograph reads, “A $1 marker pen designed by Johns Hopkins students is filled with enough reagent to administer up to 400 prenatal disease tests.” The article, breaking down the device, goes on: Every year, a combined 6.3 million pregnant women and newborns die from pregnancy and childbirth complications. Ninety-nine percent of maternal deaths occur in developing countries where most women receive little, if any, prenatal care. So Monagle, now a graduate student at the university’s Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design—along with his engineering classmates Maxim Budyansky, Sherri Hall, Matthew Means, Shishira Nagesh Mary O’Grady, Peter Truskey and James Waring—designed a pen that can identify prenatal diseases early, accurately and far more costeffectively than other methods. In the U.S., the most common way for doctors to screen expectant mothers fo...