Georgia CTSA-supported Project Wins 2018 Capstone Design Expo
Georgia CTSA-supported Project Wins 2018 Capstone Design Expo
Georgia Tech’s Capstone Design Expo is the largest student design expo in the U.S. It is an opportunity for student teams to present their innovative ideas to solve real-world problems to industry, investors, and the public. Georgia CTSA helped support 16 Georgia Tech Biomedical Engineering (BME) teams through funding from the Innovation Catalyst program in the 2018 Fall Capstone Design Expo. In the fall 2018 semester, 153 teams competed.
James Wroe, Supleuractive team member says, “I am grateful for Georgia CTSA’s support of the BME Capstone program. It is a unique course that does a great job of teaching BME students how to develop and pitch attention grabbing ideas, and the connections that the Georgia CTSA provides to students play a big role in this process.”
Supleuractive won best overall project at the 2018 Fall Capstone Design Expo. Supleuractive is an “efficient, reusable, and low-cost lung drain device that is fit for use in developing nations and can replace the current gravity drainage used in Ethiopian hospitals.” The lung drain project aimed to provide a simple, reusable, and cost-effective solution to the lack of suction problem in under-resourced hospitals of developing nations. The majority of previous solutions have involved electrical components, which are rendered useless in these settings with unreliable electricity.
Team members, James Wroe, Yige Huang, Hannah Choi, and Tara Ramachandran, designed the EZ Drain Adapter System which creates an airtight seal with the current fluid collection jars used in the hospitals of developing nations. These jars are then manually depressurized without requiring any external power supply and can be either immediately used or stored for future use.
Team members plan to run a small clinical trial of Supleuractive at Black Lion Hospital in Ethiopia. They have recently met with professors at Georgia Tech and Emory who work in global health and medical device design. The Supleuractive team will work with sponsors from Black Lion Hospital to help move forward with the clinical trial.
Georgia CTSA’s Innovation Catalyst program aims to develop and implement training programs that will supply investigators with skills and knowledge to traverse the idea path. The program supports the BME Capstone Design program to meet this aim. The program is a series of courses offered to undergraduate BME students at Georgia Tech. Students work in teams to design, build, and test prototypes with real world applications.
The Georgia Clinical & Translational Science Alliance (Georgia CTSA) is an inter-institutional magnet that concentrates basic, translational, and clinical research investigators, community clinicians, professional societies, and industry collaborators in dynamic clinical and translational research projects. Emory engaged three of its close academic partners – Morehouse School of Medicine, Georgia Tech, and UGA – to form the Georgia CTSA. This partnership, a strategic multi-institutional alliance, offers compelling, unique, and synergistic advantages to research and patients statewide.
Georgia CTSA is one of nearly 60 in a national consortium striving to improve the way biomedical research is conducted across the country. The consortium, funded through the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) and the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical and Translational Science Awards, shares a common vision to translate laboratory discoveries into treatments for patients, engage communities in clinical research efforts, and train the next generation of clinical investigators.