Water is the essence for life on Earth. It's a basic human need, making up approximately 60 percent of an adult human's body. We all need it to survive, but access to safe water is a struggle for many humans across the globe.

"Water is something that unites all of us as people, regardless of who you are and where you live," said Dr. Jason Marion, associate professor of environmental health science at Eastern Kentucky University. "Everybody has the same questions about whether the water they're drinking is of good quality or not. People think about this, it's just who we are. It's been that way ever since humans have walked the planet."

Dr. Marion got his feet wet in the role of clean water and public health while earning his PhD at The Ohio State University. Specializing in environmental health and epidemiology, Dr. Marion studied the lakes and bodies of water in Ohio, determining whether or not they were safe for people to swim in.

"We use a fecal indicator bacteria called E. coli that a lot of people are familiar with," he said. "Most E. coli are harmless to our health. We have a lot of them in our gut, and they're good for us, they help us digest our food, but when we find them in the water, that suggests that there might be a problem.

“While a few strains of E. coli are pathogenic, most are not. E. coli are important because we cannot feasibly measure all of the many different types of pathogens that could be in the water from fecal contamination. So, the World Health Organization and EPA advise using the amount of E. coli in the water as a way to practically determine the cumulative risk of the waterborne disease from the many types of pathogens, including viruses, that could be (lurking) in the contaminated water."

Globally, there are billions of cases of waterborne illness annually but the frequency of these illnesses along with death are most pronounced with children. The WHO reports that 780 million people worldwide lack access to improved drinking water sources and nearly one-third of the world's population—approximately 2.5 billion people—lacks basic sanitation. Consequently, diarrhea kills 525,000 children under 5 per year, causes more than 1.7 billion infections, and is the leading cause of malnutrition for children under 5.

After receiving his degree and with over a decade of service with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Dr. Marion moved south to work at Eastern Kentucky University in the Department of Environmental Health Science. There, he began working with students from Kenya who were looking to do public health research and encouraged them to do their research on a topic close to home and close to their heart. With help from a small grant, Dr. Marion traveled to East Africa with the students to test their hometown water supplies and found high levels of E. coli in the water, which was the water supply that many of the students grew up drinking. Building off of this work, he continued to work with other Kenyan students at EKU on water quality issues and with some of the local institutions in Kenya including Kisii University. When EKU's Board of Regents launched an innovation fund, Dr. Marion threw his hat in the ring and ColiGlow was born.

"I put my hand up and said, 'I've got a better way of measuring E. coli in those types of settings because I've tried to use all the other methods, and I've lugged all the heavy equipment around," he explained.

His signature ColiGlow kit is simple and affordable. It is a low-cost way to quantify E. coli in water sources in low-resource areas. It allows the user to have a better understanding of the levels of E. coli present—not just if E. coli is present—and make informed decisions about their water supply. The kit is designed to be used by anyone in any environment—researchers, individuals concerned about their water, citizen scientists, children (a fun aspect of the kit is that it can glow bright blue under light).

"With E. coli, we don't want to just know presence or absence. For many parts of the world, unfortunately everyone's got E. coli in their water, so those types of tests aren't going to work for about half the world's population, about four billion people," Dr. Marion said. "We need to be able to count in some sort of way how great the risk is and then allow people to prioritize where to either have improvement or issue advisories to inform people of what they can do.

"Coliglow is an empowerment tool. It gives people the ability to collect their own water samples and then advocate for improvements, whether you're a citizen scientist working on the Hickman Creek watershed (in Kentucky) or you're trying to get a better water source to drink from in western Kenya."

Through field tests from Kentucky to Kenya, the feedback from communities is promising as his initial partners are clamoring for more kits to test their local water.

Dr. Marion's work has also been recognized by the global health community. In April, his presentation of ColiGlow took home the top prize in the Innovation Pitch Contest at the Unite For Sight Global Health and Innovation Conference.

"I was pretty taken aback when I won," he said. "It was a lot because it's not just me there's a lot of other people. These ideas don't just come from nowhere—they're put into our heads and they're put into our hearts from something that I've seen. You see people who don't have water and who don't have safe water to drink. You see the family members of your students who have to grow up without safe water. You see the deceased father of one of your former students who died of Salmonella Typhi (Typhoid fever)."

With the $2,000 competition prize, Dr. Marion plans to manufacture and distribute as many ColiGlow kits as possible to give to his colleagues at Kisii University, attempting to fulfill his sense of obligation to the partners who got him here. He's also grateful to those who helped him build the foundation for this project—Dr. Tom Martin and Dr. Lindsay Cormier at EKU, Monique Quarterman and Dr. Megan Aanstoos from Kentucky Commercialization Ventures, Eric Hartman of University of Kentucky's Office of Technology Commercialization, and Launch Blue's UAccel Program, among others.

With the confidence of the win and the support of the community carrying him, Dr. Marion is excited for the future of ColiGlow. He's looking forward to getting the kits out into the world, building his team, and partnering with local, national, and international groups interested in testing water in their communities. He has recently formed a new company called Eastern Scientific, LLC and is planning to commercialize this technology to move it forward.

"We will be able to work with a lot of groups to do water quality testing," he said, "that will both get people interested in science and provide high-quality scientific data that they'll be able to compare with the standards that we provide."

By: Erin Shea

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Launch Blue nurtures promising startup founders and university innovators through intensive accelerator and incubator programs. Its funding partners are the University of Kentucky: Office of Technology Commercialization, KY Innovation, the U.S. Economic Development Administration, and the National Science Foundation.