Past Collegiate Inventors Competition Winners
Learn about the student inventors who have excelled in the Collegiate Inventors Competition®. You can search our past competition winners by name, year or university.
Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering (MAGE) for Renewable Chemicals, Fuels, and Therapeutics
Harris Wang was a student in the lab of George Church, a researcher well-known in the world of genetic sequencing for his attempts to make genetic sequencing faster and cheaper. Church was long interested in creating faster tools for cell programming, and discovered that Wang was willing to take on the challenge. Wang knew that cell programming was still a slow and hands-on process. So he developed a protocol designed to permit faster cell programming, and then put together hardware and software to automate it. He calls the approach MAGE: Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering.
To demonstrate, Wang engineered a strain of E. coli bacterium that produces lycopene - a red-colored antioxidant, abundant in tomatoes and that may be linked to reduced rates of prostate cancer. Wang added the genetic recipe for lycopene to the bacterium's chromosome. Then he used his MAGE approach to evolve a strain of the bacteria in which production of lycopene was highly efficient. In a more traditional approach, researchers painstakingly isolate, snip apart, reassemble, and reinsert individual genes.
Wang, on the other hand, quickly produced billions of mutations - far more than he would have had time to create by hand. Wang believes that his technology will allow bioengineers to produce customized microorganisms much more cheaply and quickly than possible before. Such engineered microorganisms might be used to produce a wide variety of useful compounds, such as antibiotics, biofuels, and chemotherapy drugs.
Wang, 26, is currently working towards his doctorate in biophysics. Born in Beijing, Wang moved with his family to the U.S. at age nine and grew up in Salt Lake City. He remembers as a child when his aunt made him write out thousands of Chinese calligraphy characters. If he thought about writing a thousand characters, it was daunting, but if he thought about writing characters in sets of ten, then it wasn"t. He says, "Science is often this way, too. We may look at a big scientific challenge and get intimidated by the size, scale, and scope, but if we boil it down into smaller components, then we can make progress in a reasonable manner."
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Harris Wang
Nanocircuits
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Yu Huang
Nanodropper
For millions of people with eye conditions such as glaucoma, the unregulated size of eyedropper tip openings poses significant problems. Oversized drops dispensed from these bottles result in wasted medication, leading many patients to run out before their insurance will cover a refill — and each missed dose can contribute to vision loss. Nanodropper is a universal adapter for eyedrop medication bottles that creates smaller and more efficacious droplets to reduce waste, decreases per-dose costs and ultimately increases access to expensive, essential medications.
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Mackenzie Andrews
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Allisa J. Song
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Jennifer Steger
Nanoparticles that Communicate to Amplify Drug and Imaging Agent Targeting to Disease
Geoffrey von Maltzahn turns what may be a new page in nanomedicine with his method of using a pair of nanoparticles that work together in an innovative way to increase the effectiveness and lower the side effects of existing cancer drugs. In his approach, one set of nanoparticles lodges in tumors and generates numerous targets for a second set of nanoparticles that deliver anti-cancer drugs. This process of signal amplification differs from traditional combination therapies and may make it possible to target such drugs much more directly than currently possible, potentially allowing higher doses to reach tumors while sparing healthy cells.
Powerful cancer-killing drugs are well-known to science and widely used in clinical medicine, but since these drugs are also highly toxic to healthy cells, targeting drugs specifically to tumors has been a major focus in cancer research. Of late, much of this drug-targeting research has looked at using nanoparticles to carry the drugs to tumors. A major challenge, however, is that cancer cells, and the tumors they may form, have finite numbers of targets to which nanoparticles can attach - and since a given nanoparticle can carry only a small drug payload, this limits the amount of drug that can be delivered.
Tumors have a high demand for nutrients and oxygen, and as a result have many blood vessels supplying them. Von Maltzahn"s first nanoparticle targets the tumor blood vessels and in doing so, causes local bleeding. The bleeding prompts the body to turn on clotting factors in the area. Then, the second nanoparticle comes in, programmed to be attracted to the activated clotting factors, and delivers a cancer drug. Since the body responds to an even small amount of bleeding with a flood of clotting factors, this process dramatically increases the number of targets for the drug-carrying particles. In essence, the first nanoparticles find the tumors and then recruit the second nanoparticles from circulation by harnessing a natural chain reaction.
Von Maltzahn has compelling data demonstrating efficacy in mouse experiments, and hopes to continue refining his approach to make it particularly effective in delivering drugs to patients with highly metastatic cancers, and other diseases.
Raised first in Arlington, Texas and then Fairfax, Virginia, Von Maltzahn, 29, received degrees from both MIT and the University of California, San Diego before beginning his current work on a Ph.D. in medical engineering and physics. He was influenced when he was young by his interest in art and his observations of the natural world around him. He says, "It was a fun process of observation, interpretation, and creation. Today, I use many of the same processes in the medium of biologically-inspired engineering."
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Geoffrey Von Maltzahn
Nanoscale Electronics and Optoelectronics from Nanowire Building Blocks
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