About Us
We want every baby born in Kenya screened before they leave the ward.
ZuriHemo is a Kenyan health company based in Kakamega. We handle the part of newborn screening that nobody else was doing: getting the sample to the lab and the result back.
What we do
Every baby born in Kenya gets screened for sickle cell disease, whatever county they are born in and whatever their family earns.
What we're building
A sample logistics and reporting network for newborn screening across East Africa. Sickle cell first, then the rest of the panel.
How we work
We fill existing laboratories rather than compete with them, we ask clinics to buy nothing, and a rural dispensary gets the same turnaround as a private hospital in Nairobi.
Why We Exist
Sickle cell disease is treatable. Being born far from a lab is what kills these children.
About 1.5 million babies are born in Kenya each year, and 14,000 to 16,000 of them have sickle cell disease. Between half and four-fifths will die before they turn five if nobody finds it in time.
Daily penicillin from a few months old prevents most of those deaths. The drug is cheap and the test is decades old. What is missing is the system that connects a baby in a sub-county dispensary to a laboratory three hundred kilometres away, and gets the answer back while it still matters.
That system is the whole company.
Our Team
People who have worked the bench and the ward.
Laboratory science, public health, and frontline clinical care. Between us we have run the tests, the outreach, and the clinics this company depends on.
Mongare Nicholas
Founder & CEO
Sammy Kipkogei
Co-Founder & Medical Laboratory Technologist
Felix Sakwa
Public Health Officer
Linner Cherono
Clinical Officer
Advisory Board
People who have built health systems before we did.
Our advisors are the people we call before we commit to a county, a laboratory partner, or a funding round. They are the decisions where getting it wrong costs us a year.
Bob Ananda
Advisory Board
Supported by
Where We Operate
We start where the burden is worst.
Western Kenya has the highest sickle cell prevalence in the country and the least screening capacity. That is the right place to find out whether this works.
- 1
Starting
Kakamega & Kisumu
A handful of high-burden clinics and one accredited hub laboratory. We prove the five days is real on the first hundred babies before we sell it to anybody.
- 2
Next
Western & Nyanza
Agreements with county health departments, and point-of-care training across the facilities they run: Kakamega, Bungoma, Kisumu, Kilifi.
- 3
Then
Kenya, then across the border
Every high-burden county in the country, then the same reverse-logistics model along cross-border corridors into Uganda and Tanzania.
Work with us on the first county.
We are talking to hospitals, county health departments, and funders ahead of the first screening runs.