BUSINESS NEWS
Top honors in the 2008 Biomedical Engineering Innovation, Design, and Entrepreneurship Award (BMEidea) competition—a national competition celebrating student biomedical innovation—were announced in June. Presentation of the awards was made by representatives of the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA; Hadley, MA), which sponsors and organizes the competition.
First prize—a cash award of $10,000—was awarded to Rapid Suture from Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA). The team developed a small, inexpensive device that enables quick, safe, and easy surgical tissue manipulation during laparoscopic procedures.
The second cash prize of $2500 was given to the KMC ApneAlert team from Northwestern University (Evanston, IL). This team's device monitors the abdominal breathing movements of premature infants and sounds an alarm when the infant stops breathing.
The third prize, $1000 in cash, was given to the Regen team from Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore). Regen is a small implantable receptacle that diffuses pain-relieving analgesic at a controlled and sustained rate directly at the site of a laparoscopic incision.
For more information about the BMEidea competition, visit the NCIIA Web site at www.nciia.org.
