Medical Device Link.

Originally Published MX July/August 2005

BUSINESS NEWS

Medtech companies on the hunt for new product ideas and engineering talent would do well to pay attention to the winners of the Biomedical Engineering Innovation Design Awards (BMEidea), a new showcase competition for students involved in developing medical products.

Accepting the inaugural BMEidea awards on behalf of their teams (from left): Elizabeth Tran (Washington University, St. Louis), Ashkon Shaahinfar (John Hopkins University, Baltimore), and Amy Lee (Stanford University; Palo Alto, CA). (click to enlarge)

Winners of the inaugural BME idea competition were announced in June, during the Medical Design Excellence Awards (MDEA) ceremony at the Medical Design & Manufacturing (MD&M) East exposition in New York City.

The BMEidea competition recognizes excellence in student biomedical innovation. Winning teams at this year’s competition were selected from a pool of entries submitted by some of the nation's top biomedical engineering departments, and were judged by a panel of faculty and industry representatives.

The first-place team, from Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA), received a $10,000 cash prize in recognition of its work. The team has developed the Embolune, a novel treatment for cerebral aneurysms. At the awards ceremony, team member Amy Lee said that the competition offered "a nice culmination of a year of working on the project and trying to find ways to promote it and to raise funding. The students involved in this project do it all on their own time. It's nice to be recognized for all our work."

The second-place winner was the entry for a bioimpedance probe to detect preterm labor from a team at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore).

The third-place award was presented for the Halo-Pack, a low-profile cervical spine orthosis, submitted by a team from Washington University (St. Louis).

The judges evaluated the teams on a variety of criteria. The winning entries were required to solve a relevant clinical problem; meet technical, economic, legal, and regulatory requirements; feature a novel and practical design; and show potential for commercialization.

The BMEidea competition was established by the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA; Hadley, MA), an alliance of nearly 200 colleges and universities across the United States whose mission is to support and encourage invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship in higher education, fostering the technological innovators and business leaders of the future.

Weilerstein

"We are pleased to honor these outstanding student biomedical innovators," said Phil Weilerstein, NCIIA executive director. "Each year the NCIIA funds a strong group of biomedical projects through our Advanced E-Team grants program; these winners represent some of the finest among the teams we have funded."

The competition is organized and sponsored by NCIIA in partnership with the National Science Foundation, Medical Device & Diagnostic Industry magazine, the Biomedical Engineering Society, and the Industrial Designers Society of America. The competition is endorsed by the Council of Chairs of Bioengineering and Biomedical Engineering Programs. For additional information about the BMEidea competition, visit the NCIIA Web site at www.nciia.org.

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