Organ Transport Team Wins $10,000 BMEStart Competition

A team of undergraduate inventors has won first place in the 2014 BMEStart Competition for their innovative small bowel perfusion and transportation system. Sponsored by the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, the competition recognizes the finest in undergraduate biomedical engineering innovation and awards $10,000 to the winning team.

The Yale team’s transportation system has the potential to greatly improve the success rate of intestine transplants. The intestine is notoriously difficult to transplant because the tissue breaks down rapidly when out of the body. The Yale team’s invention preserves the organ by pumping a nutrient solution through the main intestinal track as well as the surrounding vasculature, simultaneously supplying the organ with necessary components to prevent organ death and impeding harmful waste products from accreting.

The transportation system was invented as the team’s final project for “MENG 404: Medical Device Design and Innovation,” a class co-taught by assistant director of the Center for Engineering Innovation and Design Joseph Zinter and School of Medicine research scientist Richard Fan that tasks students with solving problems in medical treatment proposed by faculty at Yale-New Haven Hospital. In last fall’s class, teammates Natalie Pancer, Andrew Crouch, Brian Loeb, Raja Narayan, and Kristi Oki were presented with the problem of intestinal transport by Dr. John Geibel, professor of surgery and of cellular and molecular physiology, vice chair of surgery, and director of surgical research.

The team has continued to improve their device beyond the class, and in addition to their competition win, their device has also been approved for experimentation by a number of New England organ banks to quantify its performance against conventional transportation techniques. Having already successfully completed an initial trial transporting pig intestine, the team expects their device to begin experimentation on human small intestine transport within a few weeks.

For their competition win, the team will be honored at the 2014 BMES Annual Meeting in San Antonio, TX.