When Asanterabi Malima was 15, his father suffered a fatal heart attack at 57. He had been an accomplished scholar and minister in the Tanzanian government. “Everyone in my family is in politics,” said Malima, PhD’13, a graduate of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and now a postdoctoral researcher in Northeastern’s Center for High Rate Nanomanufacturing.
They all expected he’d keep with the family business, but his father’s early passing set Malima on a different course. “My passion was always to develop some kind of technology to diagnose diseases earlier, to come up with something that wouldn’t save my father, since he’d already passed away, but may save somebody else’s parent,” Malima said.
In 2012, this vision became a reality when he founded Biolom with fellow Northeastern alumni Cihan Yilmaz, PhD’13, and Jaydev Upponi, PhD’12, graduates of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering and the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, respectively.
They started the biotechnology firm to commercialize a device they had developed at the center under the guidance of its director Ahmed Busnaina, the William Lincoln Smith Chair and professor in the College of Engineering. Their device is smaller than a pinhead and has the capacity to diagnose a variety of diseases at their earliest stages.