It might feel like a pleasant irony to employ honeybees to detect the presence of diabetes in people. But that’s exactly what five students of HEC Paris B-school in France have come up with. Their Bee Healthy initiative uses honeybees to detect the scent of diabetes (among other diseases) on people’s breath. India, with 65.1 million diabetics, is home to the world’s second highest diabetic population, the number is anticipated to further go up to 109 million by 2030, according to the IDF Diabetes Atlas Sixth Edition Update 2013. This explains the students’ choice of Mumbai for the pilot project.
Kelsey Julius, Co-Founder of Bee Healthy and a Masters student in Sustainable Development at HEC, says India is experiencing huge growth in urban migration. Also, Mumbai is home to India’s largest slum, Dharavi. High population density and lack of infrastructure in urban slums are straining the urban health system. It is estimated, she adds, that around 65 million people live in urban slums in India, meaning that “our work has the ability to expand and reach urban slum dwellers all over India.” Besides, the Maharashtra Nature Park is located adjacent to Dharavi, providing an urban oasis for people and bees alike.
Pilot projectOne of six projects chosen from 2,000 to compete in the final of the Hult Prize – a competition which invites teams from business schools around the world to create sustainable social business start-ups — the HEC team’s pilot project started on August 18 and will run until September 15. Juliet and Tobias, two other members of the team, are already in Mumbai.
For the pilot project, a local company, Under the Mango Tree, with urban beekeeping initiatives in Mumbai, has agreed to lend the team some bees. “Currently, we collect the bees with a retrofitted handheld vacuum cleaner and individually place them into small harnesses to get them ready for training. In the future, we would like to automate this process to speed things up and avoid getting stung!”
Elaborating on the training procedure of the bees, Kelsey says, “It is like Pavlov’s dogs. We subject our bees to a sample that is indicative of a certain disease and reward them with sugar water. We do this a few times until the bees extend their proboscis (stick out their tongue) in anticipation of the reward when subjected to a sample. The test is done by asking patients to blow on the trained bees and if they stick out their tongues, we know that the scent we have trained them to, is present on the patient’s breath.”
As part of the competition, Bee Healthy has to prove that they can reach 25 million people by 2019. Through the development of strong partnerships, the team will also have to present the financial feasibility and growth potential of the business model. “Finally, while in India, our team will be developing a prototype device that could be used to test urban slum dwellers for diseases using bees. We will be testing cultural and social acceptance of this device in Dharavi,” Kelsey says.
The HEC squad will be competing against teams from Wharton, the Indian School of Business, and ESADE among others for the $1 million in seed-funding.