Tamara Chayo

MEDU’s journey: From a need to a startup focused on changing an industry

The idea of how MEDU was born is a story I like to tell often, it reminds me that the most obvious needs are the least addressed in most cases, and that we need to change the approach we have as humanity.

This story begins in March 2020, the beginning of the pandemic, the world not knowing how to react to an unknown, uncontrollable and highly lethal virus. I don’t know if you remember those moments of quarantine, when you could see on the news the doctors covered and protecting themselves with garbage bags, sad because it showed that even with all the technology in the world we were not able to protect the people who were saving thousands of lives by exposing their own.

Well, in my family and people close to me there are several focused on the medical sector, doctors, nurses, paramedics, and at that time they were the heroes without a cape at the forefront of the fight against the pandemic. It gave me an enormous impotence to see them uncovered or little protected and that nobody did anything to protect them. So, with my “if you don’t do it, no one else will” mentality, I embarked on this journey to create personal protective equipment that would perform better than anything on the market, that would be much more affordable, and that I could produce as soon as possible.

The problem with any PPE that is disposable, is that it cannot be used between patients, because you can catch it from a previous patient’s exposure, and it was a problem, because doctors had scarce resources to follow this rule, so if this was the problem, my mind thought: why not encapsulate them?

And this is how the whole part of the technical fabric that we have began to develop in my head, I researched endlessly about technical fabrics, how they work and what they involve, and in turn I embarked on the study of membranes (because I had a class that had to do with filtration at that time) to understand the behaviors and developments of the same. And so it was through trial and error for 6 months, we obtained a technical fabric that could encapsulate bacteria and viruses, allowing the use of a PPE between patients, that disinfection was not a problem (because with soap and water it could be sterilized), and that the performance was optimized to more than 50 washes.

That’s when I decided to start raising money with the help of friends, family and the community in general, to be able to develop this product, and donate it all over Mexico, because yes: we needed to protect the health personnel regardless of the profit in the first instance, that’s how we delivered more than 5000 gowns in more than 15 states in Mexico, impacting more than 1500 health professionals.

This is also how MEDU started to be part of accelerators and programs, which allowed the idea to develop beyond just donations, but to turn it into a Startup that could have a real impact. And seeing the problem of waste, costs and lack of sustainability in the medical sector, he decided to start attacking this big problem in the industry. That’s why our protection equipment became the key to success: it’s a product that has a triple impact.

1. It ‘s sustainable: The useful life is 50 washes, which saves 25 kilos of garbage per protective equipment sold. And at the end of this useful life, we give it a second life (we recycle it) so that we do not generate waste.
2. It saves a lot of money: Yes, apart from all this, even being washable, it saves 90% of the costs to hospitals, which allows the budget in this type of equipment to be allocated to other causes.
3. It reactivates the economy: At least in Mexico it allows us to have an impact with the society that helps us to manufacture the whole product, and thus impact several families, having a direct social impact.

And this is how MEDU was officially born on July 7th in the CDMX: with a team of people willing to change their environment, with the vision of a much more sustainable world, and willing to do everything in our hands to make it possible.

So, what are you waiting for to join us? A small action from your trench can change everything, so join the #MEDUmovement.