The Italian project Bilistick was selected in the United States as the winner of the Saving Life at Birth: A Grand Challenge for Development award sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the U.K. Agency for International Development. Saving Life at Birth ( www.savinglivesatbirth.net<http://www.savinglivesatbirth.net/) awards the best projects that focus on prevention and treatment for pregnant women and the newborn. Every year, 150,000 women and 1.6 million infants die during childbirth, in addition to 1.2 million stillbirths.

Bilistick, selected from an initial pool of 400 projects, is an innovative low-cost diagnostic device developed as a point-of-care system to measure the plasma concentration of bilirubin in the whole blood of newborn. This new, rapid first-level diagnostic system is particularly well-suited for screening projects in developing countries or in remote areas of the Northern Hemisphere, where monitoring during the first few days after birth is necessary for non-Caucasians, whose skin colour makes it difficult to detect the jaundice caused by abnormal bilirubin levels. In many cases the jaundice regresses spontaneously. At times, however, it is particularly intense and requires rapid response, since bilirubin can damage the nervous system of newborn infants.

Bilistick comprises a test strip and a reader. A drop of blood is placed on the test strip, using a specially-calibrated capillary pipette, so that the system is minimally invasive. The plasma is separated from corpusculated blood, and the concentration of bilirubin is measured by the reader - the results appear on the screen within two minutes. The system can measure concentrations of bilirubin with the same accuracy as that achieved by clinical laboratories. Unlike the latter, and thanks to the simplicity of the method, its reduced size, and the fact that the device is battery-powered, Bilistick does not require professional staff and/or equipped facilities to perform this analysis, making the diagnosis and monitoring of neonatal jaundice possible away from a hospital setting, such as in community health centres and consulting rooms.

Saving Life at Birth will award the project a grant of USD 250,000 for the further development and diffusion of the device.  As early as 2011, Carlos Coda Zabetta, an Argentine researcher who is part of the Bilistick development group, received an award from Working Capital-PNI. The development group includes Prof. Claudio Tiribelli of the Fondazione Italiana Fegato-ONLUS and Prof. Richard Partridge Wenneberg of the University of Washington, who spent two years at the Liver Study Centre to develop the project. Bilistick is a technology developed by Bilimetrix s.r.l., a startup that was founded in late 2012 at Innovation Factory, the business incubator of AREA Science Park Trieste.