By Mark Vazquez, Program Manager, GCHS
April 17th, 2026
Infection control is one of those things that sounds simple until you actually try it. It’s like assembling IKEA furniture while wearing three pairs of gloves, a fogged-up face shield, and trying not to touch anything.
At the UNMC Global Center for Health Security, I’ve seen firsthand how hard it is to deliver safe, effective care in the face of deadly high-consequence infectious diseases (HCID). It’s not that we don’t know what to do; it’s that the systems around us make it feel like we’re playing Operation on expert mode.
Then along came the Carecube, and suddenly, the rules of the game started to change.
This little plastic box of brilliance has been years in the making. It’s a collaboration between clinicians, engineers, researchers and frontline healthcare professionals who all asked the same question: What if infection control didn’t have to feel like an obstacle course?
Now, with Carecubes’s Series A funding, that “what if” is becoming a “when.” I’m not just excited for the business milestone. I’m excited that we might finally reduce the number of panic attacks that occur when entering every HCID patient room.
The idea for the Carecube came out of the 2014 Ebola crisis, when healthcare professionals realized that caring for HCID patients can be…character-building, to say the least. One wrong move and you’re suddenly in a real-life episode of Contagion.
Back then, every task took twice as long, HCID waste piled up, and patients were left alone behind barriers of personal protective equipment (PPE), worried about their situation and what might come next. The caregivers? They just wanted to do what they were trained for: actual, human-centered, evidence-based care, preferably without looking like they were auditioning for Project Hail Mary.
Fast-forward to 2021. I joined UNMC right in the middle of the COVID turmoil and witnessed Dr. James Lawler, Dr. Jana Broadhurst and Dr. David Brett-Major take the Carecube from a whiteboard concept to a full-blown, functioning system. Backed by the CDC, DARPA, and ASPR (basically the Avengers of infectious disease) they turned an idea into something that could make life easier for people on the frontlines.
What makes the Carecube special isn’t just its design, it’s the fact that it was built with and for the people who use it. Every tweak, every airflow vent, every access port came from real subject matter experts and their hands-on feedback.
My favorite story? At a test site in western Nebraska, the chief internist deployed the Carecube, triggered a code blue, and the response team just…did it. No training, no panic, no chaos. They worked naturally, like they’d been doing it for years. It was the medical equivalent of watching someone parallel park perfectly on the first try.
The Carecube isn’t just for exotic diseases like Ebola or Marburg. It’s for everyday use when dealing with flu, RSV, tuberculosis, pertussis, and whatever new surprise the microbial world decides to throw at us next.
It’s for rural hospitals without negative-pressure rooms. It’s for nursing homes, dialysis centers, border towns, and anywhere people gather to share questionable sniffles, sneezes or coughs.
Best of all, it’s intuitive, affordable, and doesn’t require a PhD in HVAC engineering to operate. Because if we can make infection control feel easy, we’re already halfway to winning the next crisis.
As Carecubes looks ahead to what comes next, every step in product development follows the same golden rule: isolate the pathogen, not the patient. (Honestly, it should be printed on t-shirts.)
With the Series A funding, we have a chance to scale a system that makes healthcare safer, more efficient, and a lot less stressful. And if we can make infection control just a little less miserable for everyone? That’s a victory worth celebrating.
Preferably with pizza, not hand sanitizer.
Story link: A New Standard for Infection Control Built from the Ground Up – Carecubes