Bioengineering students participated in a new Capstone Project last year that matched their skills with medical problems. Members of Group 3 (from left), Stephen T. Robinson, Esmael Paryavi, Kaiyi Xie, Bernard Pak-Ning Wong and Walter Beller-Morales, won first place and the “best in patent” award for their endotracheal drug delivery tool, which they developed while working with a doctor at the University of Maryland Baltimore Medical School.
CORRECTION: Due to an editing error, this article incorrectly stated a professor’s title. Ian White is a bioengineering assistant professor.
Bioengineering students from this university had the opportunity to apply their knowledge to real problems in the medical community for the first time under the wing of University of Maryland Baltimore doctors.
Senior students in the engineering school’s Fischell Department of Bioengineering worked directly with doctors starting last fall to create new technologies to benefit the medical field while simultaneously fulfilling requirements for their capstone projects. For the first time, the program’s mentors included faculty members at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, cementing a formal mentoring partnership between the two institutions that will continue this year.
Bioengineering assistant professor Ian White, and Jeffrey Hasday, the head of pulmonary medicine in the University of Maryland Medical Center’s intensive care unit, were at the forefront of the project. Hasday mentored a team of students who created, researched and developed medical devices for real-world use, and White advised another team.
Several mentors said a unique approach to bioengineering is what sets this university’s capstone project apart from other programs. Instead of designing a product and then finding a use for it, students develop products based on the problems medical staff members bring to them, a strategy that leads to more useful inventions.
“In three years of studying engineering, students rarely encounter real-world engineering problems,” White, who was unavailable for an interview, said in a video about the collaboration.
“In the medical center, however, we find problems all the time that we don’t know what to do with, and it seemed to be a logical marriage of docs who can recognize problems and bring them to the engineers who can solve them,” Hasday added.
Every student who graduates from the university with a bioengineering degree must complete a capstone project, but what they create is not just for school — students’ inventions often end up with patents and can form the foundations for real companies.
Graduate student and former Student Government Association president Kaiyi Xie’s group, supervised by Hasday, created the endotracheal aerosol generating catheter, which addressed the problem of giving accurate doses of medication to patients on respiratory support. Only 1 to 3 percent of the drug typically makes it to the lungs, but with the catheter, the drug is aerosolized, which allows a higher dose to reach the lungs.
“Why not go out to the source and figure out what people, practitioners actually need from engineers?” Xie said. “You see that a lot — sometimes, people design things without really thinking, ‘What is it actually going to be used for,’ whereas we thought, ‘What do you need from us?’”
Teams are given $500, and at the end of the year, have their creations judged by a panel of doctors, engineers and FDA officials. Xie’s group won first place, as well as the “best in patent” award, at the capstone presentations in May. His group launched a company surrounding their device, and its members are continuing to patent and research as they prepare to license the catheter out to other companies for production.
Xie, who is studying for his master’s degree in bioengineering, hopes to become a patent agent. He said his experience with the Baltimore-College Park collaboration will benefit his career.
“This collaboration really brought us to the next level,” he said. “It was a cool thing that it allowed us to get practical experience, not just in the engineering side, but in the business, intellectual property side of things as well.”
Beginning fall of their senior year, students take classes to learn about creating medical devices and meet with doctors from local hospitals. Doctors present their problems and ideas for solutions, and students take turns shadowing medical departments before splitting off into teams of four or five.
This year, 13 teams of graduating seniors participated, and capstone coordinator Yang Tao said that number is growing. He added the department aims to keep improving the program by making it more organized and structured each year without limiting students’ ability to be creative.
