NCIIA Announces Winners of the 2012 BMEidea Competition

PHILADELPHIA, May 23, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA), an educational nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting and promoting invention and innovation on college and university campuses nationwide, has announced the winners for the eighth annual Biomedical Engineering Innovation, Design and Entrepreneurship Award (BMEidea), a national competition celebrating graduate and undergraduate student inventors. The winners were announced during this evening's Medical Design Excellence Awards (MDEA), part of the Medical Design & Manufacturing East (MD&M East) conference, held this year at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia.

First place—a prize of $10,000—was awarded to Johns Hopkins University team, CryoPop, which has partnered with university-affiliated NGO, Jhpiego, to develop a solution to prevent cervical cancer in developing countries.  CryoPop is a patent-pending, low-cost medical device that uses dry ice for the treatment of pre-cancerous cervical lesions for women in low-resource settings.

The second place prize of $2,500 was awarded to Stanford University's Calcula Technologies. Calcula Technologies is developing a novel urological medical device for the outpatient removal of kidney stones without the use of treatments like lithotripsy or the usual "go home and wait" philosophy applied to smaller stones. Calcula's patent-pending technology can treat up to four million patients per year in the US and Europe. With clear FDA predicates and existing CPT reimbursement codes, Calcula's technology brings new, anesthesia-free tools to the practice of urology.

Third place, an award of $1,000, was presented to biomedical engineering students from Georgia Institute of Technology, who have created the Magnet Assisted Intubation Device (MAID), which allows for safe, easy, and fast patient intubation to be performed by emergency medicine professionals. Using a magnetic guide system, the intubation tube can be easily inserted into the trachea without the need of a laryngoscope to visualize the airway.

Two teams also received recognition from NCIIA: Honorable Mention for Tech Innovation went to Spit'n'IT, (Surface Plasmon Interferometric Technology for Non-Invasive Testing) from Brown University, a non-invasive, portable, patent-pending device intended for the monitoring of blood glucose through a saliva test; and Honorable Mention for Social Impact went to a team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology that has developed an affordable and effective alternative solution, called Wound-Pump, to provide negative pressure wound therapy (NPWT) in low-resource and disaster settings.

The BMEidea Competition is open to  teams from US and international institutions.  The teams are required not only to submit inventive designs, but also to think through and articulate a compelling business models and strategies. Unlike the criteria for many other student design competitions, students are required to factor real-world market demands and customer needs into the product conception and design process. Winning entries must solve a clinical problem; meet technical, economic, legal, and regulatory requirements; feature novel and practical designs; and show potential for commercialization. Submissions are judged on technical feasibility; clinical utility; economic feasibility and market potential; novelty and patentability; potential for commercialization; and benefit to quality of life and care.

"This year's student teams demonstrate the potential of university innovators to positively impact health care practice on a global scale," said Phil Weilerstein, Executive Director of the NCIIA.  "The encouragement and recognition they receive at this early stage enables them to accelerate the progress of their ideas while still enrolled in an academic program. The impact is significant in preparing them to be biomedical innovators and in advancing their ideas."

For additional information about the NCIIA and BMEidea, please visit http://nciia.org.  Media interviews may be coordinated through Jill Ivey, 215.806.2951 or [email protected].

About NCIIA

The NCIIA catalyzes positive social and environmental impact through invention and technological innovation by providing funding, training, and mentoring for university faculty and student innovators.

With support from The Lemelson Foundation, the National Science Foundation and a membership of nearly 200 colleges and universities from all over the United States, the NCIIA engages approximately 5,000 student entrepreneurs each year, leveraging their campuses as working laboratories for invention and innovation and incubators for businesses, and ultimately helping them to bring their ideas to market. For more information, please visit http://www.nciia.org.

About BMEidea

BMEidea is the brainchild of the BME Innovation, Design and Entrepreneurship Alliance, a consortium of BME faculty from NCIIA member institutions with an interest in stimulating innovative design and entrepreneurial approaches in the biomedical field. First launched in 2004, winners of this annual competition are selected from some of the nation's top biomedical engineering departments and are judged by a panel of faculty and industry representatives. Winners are required to solve a pressing clinical problem; meet technical, economic, legal and regulatory requirements; feature a novel and practical design; and show potential for commercialization. For more information, please see http://nciia.org/competitions/bmeidea.

SOURCE NCIIA