Four Brown engineering students, Celina Hsieh '18, Ileana Pirozzi '18, Gian Ignacio '18 and Berke Buyukkucak '18, teamed up with Rhode Island School of Design senior Emily Holtzman to capture first place in the 2018 Johns Hopkins Healthcare Design Competition. The group's senior capstone project, EmboNet, won the Advanced Health Systems category recently sponsored by Boston Scientific and Johns Hopkins University.
The 2018 JHU Design Competition was open to all student-led teams from around the world that have designed health-related solutions. Student teams competed in three competition tracks: Design Solutions for Advanced Health Systems, Global Health/Humanitarian Design, and Healthcare Apps/Information Technology Design. EmboNet's first place win came with a $4,000 cash prize.
During cardiopulmonary bypass, debris consisting of cholesterol, fat, and blood/tissue clots arises from sandblasting and unclamping of the aorta. Embolic debris traveling to the brain may cause strokes. Other embolic protection devices have not yet shown clinical efficacy, so the group sought to address some of these shortcomings with EmboNet: Double-layered Pocketed Filter for Embolic Protection in Aortic Cannulation Cardiothoracic Surgeries. Neel Sodha, M.D., served as clinical advisor to the project, which was developed in the fall semester's Biomedical Engineering capstone design course instructed by Professor Anubhav Tripathi and Lecturer Celinda Kofron.
"We're excited to continue to develop this program to serve larger academic, clinical and entrepreneurial audiences as the project expands," said Pirozzi. "The capstone course prepared us well to proficiently deliver the technical details and quantitative testing underlying the design, but this competition gave us some new challenges: Students were also asked to prepare business models and to address in their pitches the key market competition they would face on the path to commercialization.
"We realized the judges were looking for sound, compelling engineering designs, and our win relied heavily on the technical strength of our idea," she said.