Chances to make money doing good
Friday, January 1, 2010 at 10:25PM ARTICLE: Maryland cancer-testing firm MarkPap lands first customer, By Mike Musgrove, Washington Post, December 28, 2009
Brilliant stuff from a start-up firm in Maryland that apparently sees the logic of marketing cheap-and-easy technology to the bottom-of-the-pyramid that leverages global connectivity:
Nenad and Olivera Markovic labored for years to design a low-cost kit that could be used for the early detection of cervical cancer in women in poor and underdeveloped regions. This month, the two Rockville doctors and their start-up firm landed a first customer.
In a pilot program lasting five years, MarkPap will annually provide rural provinces in China with enough kits to conduct 1 million tests, which the company says work similarly to Pap tests. The deal, made with a Chinese distributor with a presence in six of that country's 22 provinces, is worth $13.5 million to the local firm. It's the first source of outside revenue for a small company that has subsisted so far on about $1 million worth of grant money from the National Institutes of Health.
Cervical cancer once was a leading cause of death for women in the United States, but thanks to the widespread use of Pap tests, it's a disease that has become relatively rare here. That's not the case in poorer countries where there is a shortage of pathologists available to interpret test results. MarkPap's solution to this problem is a version of the test in which results can easily be sent to qualified experts via computer -- or even by cellphone, if that's what is available.
"Telemedicine is what makes this attractive," said Olivera Markovic, who left a career at the NIH as a cancer researcher to launch the firm with her husband, in part from a tiny office space in one of Rockville's business incubators. "You move images, not patients. This test can be done anywhere."
The kind of story that warms one's heart, and then makes me want to get even more involved--investment-wise--in this sort of stuff. The growing demand for medical services in emerging markets and developing economies will be a gold mine in coming decades.
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