 I'd like to introduce you to Dr. Sheik Moumar Khan, the leading virologist in West Africa. When Ebola took hold in his country of Sierra Leone, he swiftly established an Ebola ward in the Kenema Hospital. By May of last year, that Ebola ward had over 100 Ebola patients. Dr. Khan knew the risks as well as anyone. In an interview with the BBC, he said, healthcare workers are prone to the disease because, as he put it, we are the first port of call. We, even with the suits that we wear, we're at risk. Shortly after that interview, Ebola took the life of Dr. Khan. And over the coming months, the lives of 36 other healthcare workers at the Kenema Hospital alone. As this was happening, the world became increasingly transfixed, as we watched the largest public health crisis unfold before our eyes. Stories such as Dr. Khan's were overshadowed by an alarming number of deaths across all of the affected West African countries. And when Ebola hit our own U.S. borders, public attention and fear escalated. But since the very first cases of Ebola were reported in West Africa last year, the U.S. mounted a whole of government response to contain and stop the spread of this virus. We knew this is a fight we cannot lose. But we also knew that the key to containing and stopping this virus was to stop it in its tracks at its source. Now, today, our flexible and strategic response is paying off. In the country where the U.S. led the charge, Liberia has been declared Ebola-free. But our job is not done until the number of cases of Ebola are brought to zero in all of the affected countries. And we know and we continue to see that that road to zero is a long and bumpy one. So the focus of my talk today is how we're using innovation and the power of crowdsourcing to aid in our Ebola response. Last fall, we began hearing a lot of these obstacles that healthcare workers on the front lines were facing. And one of the things we heard a lot about was the suits that they wear. Doctors told us these suits become dangerously hot. Your core body temperature rises, sweat starts pouring down your body, literally fills your boots. When they get out of those suits and they dump those boots out, sweat pours out of them. Now, their vision is limited by what they can see through these little goggles. And those goggles fog up often before they even get to their first patient. And then they have to go through the laborious process of taking that suit off, piece by piece, layer by layer. And that's where the greatest risk of infection can occur. Now, imagine being a healthcare worker and having to work in those conditions. Now, imagine being a patient. You're sick, you're terrified, and this is what you see. It was clear we needed a better solution. But we also saw other obstacles. We have a number of healthcare tools. We have diagnostics where we can actually diagnose Ebola. But you have to take that blood sample and send it all the way to the lab. And that lab needs to get there by road, by air, even by boat. And that in some cases could take days. Here you can see a picture of some of the blood samples traveling to a lab by river and Guinea. And then it may take several excruciating days to get back to the patient. But the challenges we saw were not limited to technology alone. We saw communities reluctant to seek care, even in the early days, willing to admit that Ebola was real. And they didn't know how to protect themselves or their families. So each of these areas were ripe for innovation. Now at USAID, we've had great success at using grand challenges to be able to tackle tough development problems. So we turned on a dime. We issued a grand challenge within a week. And if you haven't worked with government before, let me assure you that was fast. So the president announced the Fighting Ebola Grand Challenge that USAID ran in partnership with the White House, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Department of Defense. And this was a rallying cry to engineers and entrepreneurs and scientists and students from all over the world to help us solve some of these challenges that we're seeing on the ground. And we created multiple ways for people to engage. We created a crowdsourcing platform for anyone to post their idea and get feedback on it. We issued challenge grants of up to a million dollars for those innovations that needed funding to be able to further develop and test their ideas. And we committed to developing those collaborations and partnerships necessary to bring those best ideas to the market very quickly. So to jump start our crowdsourcing efforts, we partnered with the White House Office of Science and Technology, and we held our own prototyping workshop for the suit itself. And we didn't just bring in the Duponts and the 3M's of the world. We brought in sportswear companies and companies with cooling solutions and those designers and the maker community. And we most importantly brought in doctors who had worked on the front lines with Ebola. And they brought that critical user perspective. But the exciting thing we didn't expect is we started seeing workshops and hackathons like these pop up all over the world inspired by this challenge. And some incredible ideas emerged from that. So we ended up getting over 1500 different ideas. So we then had the daunting task of having to sift through those ideas in record time. So I'm gonna give you a little snapshot of three of the innovations that we're supporting. So the first has to do with the suit. A team at Johns Hopkins University, they were inspired by the challenge. They held their own hackathon. They brought together 70 unlike minds, including a wedding dress designer. And they completely rethought that whole suit ensemble. So you can see the suit has an integrated hood with a big open visor and anti fogging capabilities in it. So the healthcare worker has much better range of visibility and the patients can see the facial expressions of that healthcare worker. The suit also had anti or had a wicking capabilities inside might find that similar to a sportswear and also a cooling pack at the back to cool the healthcare worker. And then finally, it's one single integrated design so that they can remove it faster, more easily and safer. And so I'm gonna give you a quick little demo of how that works. You can see it actually has pull tabs at the back similar to what you might find on a wetsuit and you just peel it open. It has a curl away zipper. It's really important that the healthcare worker is able to do this on their own. So the original prototype had these tabs. You just bend over, get that leverage and you pull out of that suit, you curl out of it just like you're a butterfly coming out of a chrysalis. So pretty cool, huh? So even more exciting is that we helped bring DuPont company together with the Johns Hopkins team. They have formed a collaboration. DuPont is licensing this technology and they have committed to bringing this new suit to market and that was just announced last week. Now, it's not just about the suit. We're also investing in this. So with Ebola, even some simple steps such as getting basic vital signs can be a challenge. So you imagine you're wearing that big bulky hood, you need to use a stethoscope. It's kind of hard to do that. And you may be taking care of dozens of patients at any one point in time and you have limited access to them. This cutting edge wearable sensor, it's called the multi-sense patch. I call it the smart band aid. It attaches to the sternum. You can see a picture of it here. And that wearable sensor can track everything from heart rate, temperature, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, even blood pressure. And it is Bluetooth enabled. So you can now track all of these key vital signs remotely outside of the red zone where healthcare workers monitor their patients 24 hours a day. The Scripps Translational Research Institute has been testing this in Sierra Leone. The doctors there call it a game changer. And then finally, one more area where we've been investing is around the care setting. And so if you remember, in the height of the Ebola crisis, we started seeing escalating number of patients, hospitals turning away patients because they didn't have room for them. So the US invested heavily in developing new Ebola treatment centers. That took time and money. But as we saw the epidemic change, we saw hotspots cropping up all over these countries and it became clear it would be very helpful to have much more rapidly deployable solutions. So a team at Baylor University responded and they came up with the idea of using shipping containers because shipping containers are ubiquitous in West Africa. And so they got some really good critical user feedback and found out well they actually needed a much more nimble, flexible solution. So they came up with lightweight material. They came up with a compact design and that can now be easily transported where and when you need it. And you can see in fast motion here it takes just four people to set up this unit and it just takes only four and a half minutes. So this is just, these are just three of the innovations that we're supporting through the Fighting Ebola Grand Challenge. Now we know it's not just about sourcing these innovations. We have to get them into use as quickly as possible. So we are doing just that. We're setting up clear and rigorous pathways to infuse that quick cash to ensure that the best ideas get developed. We are connecting the innovators with testing sites both in the US and in the field. We are building those critical partnerships with manufacturers so we can ensure that they can be manufactured and distributed at scale. And we are connecting the innovations to those that will buy them to make sure that there is a market on the back end. All of this with the idea in mind of getting the best ideas into the hands of those that need them in months and not years. So, and the thing that I find really exciting that each one of these innovations is great. But the thing that excites me most is imagining all of them working in an integrated manner to truly transform how we can respond to epidemics in the future. We owe it to Dr. Khan and his colleagues to make this vision a reality. This is a new way of doing business at USAID. We invite all of you to engage with us, help us tackle this and many of the world's toughest development challenges. Thank you.