Meet VitaLoop | 2026 President's Innovation Challenge Ingenuity Award Winner

I grew up in a small village in Myanmar where my parents run a rural clinic. I saw patients die not because we didn't know how to treat them, but because dialysis was out of reach. Peritoneal dialysis is a simple life-saving therapy patients can do at home. But it depends on a constant supply of sterile dialysate, which is expensive, imported, and often unavailable in rural areas. An estimated 3 million people die because they cannot access dialysis, mostly in low-resource settings where supply chains fail. We are building Vita Loop, a human-powered system that converts locally available water into dialysis solution through a compact purification and mixing process. It is designed to operate without electricity, reduce dependence on imported supplies, and significantly lower cost. In settings where dialysis fluid is unavailable, Vita Loop enables local, on-demand production, bringing treatment closer to where patients live, and making it more reliable and affordable. We are preparing to pilot this in rural clinics in Myanmar. Because the problem was never the medicine. It was access. And we've lived that reality.