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.
The PapGene Test: Early Detection of Ovarian and Endometrial Cancers
The PapGene test is a DNA sequence-based invention for the early detection of ovarian and endometrial cancers. Its underlying technology is scalable and generalizable to the early detection of many other types of cancer as well.
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Isaac Kinde
The PrestoPatch
The PrestoPatch Integrated Electrode System allays the two major shortcomings of cardiac arrhythmia treatment: 1) Difficulty in switching the shocking vector (path the shock takes through the body) between shocks and 2) Difficulty in applying standardized external pressure to the patches to reduce transthoracic impedance (resistance to the electrical shock). The PrestoPatch system saves lives by solving these problems via two separate components: 1) The Tri-Patch, a disposable three-patch electrode that allows for a instantaneously switchable shocking vector 2) The PrestoPush, an ergonomic, hand-held pressure applicator that can quickly reduce transthoracic impedance on all electrode patches.
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Aaron Chang
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Kevin George
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Piyush Poddar
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Sandya Subramanian
The Tredchair
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Megan Crosby
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J. Andrew Culp
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Angelos Dassios
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John G. Wilde
Three Dimensional, Flexible Nanoscale Field Effect Transistors as Intracellular Probes
Bozhi and Tzahi. Their names alone conjure up images of twins in a circus act, but the two men are up to something even more bizarre. They work in a world of microscopic mystery, at the interstices of the digital and the biological, where the human ends and the machine begins.
Bozhi Tian moved from Shanghai six years ago to study chemistry and materials science; Tzahi Cohen-Karni moved from Israel five years ago to study applied physics and engineering. In a Harvard University nanotechnology research laboratory, the pair has developed impossibly small semiconductor probes that can record detailed electrical activity from within a single cell.
The current standard for making cellular recordings relies on a relatively blunt needle that sucks to the cell membrane to listen in from the outside. The glass needle, known as a microelectrode or patch clamp, contains an ionic solution that responds to changes in the cell's internal electrical signaling as membrane channels open and close.
In contrast, the tip of Tian and Cohen-Karni's nanowire device is one hundredth the diameter of a microelectrode and coated with a layer of lipids, which allows it to slip inside the cell membrane to record electrical signals more directly. Using a transistor that’s built into the silicon nanowire, the device can register changes in electrical potential as small as just a few millivolts, all without disturbing the normal response of the cell.
For Tian, the challenge was synthesizing silicon nanowires bent at just the right angle to enter cells easily while still forming a complete electrical circuit. By carefully controlling the temperature and pressure of precursor gases inside a glass tube furnace, Tian was able to reliably produce successive 120-degree kinks during the nanowire growth process. Changes in the flow rates of different gases, called dopants, gave rise to internal conductance changes that produce a tiny functional region at the probe tip. It's this section, the "field effect transistor," that’s capable of measuring changes in electrical potential in the surrounding environment.
To record from living tissue, however, Cohen-Karni had to devise a new method of positioning the probe into target cells. Though each nanowire probe is tiny, with hundreds of probes forming contacts in an area half the size of your pinky nail, the overall device is part of an integrated circuit that is relatively large. So Cohen-Karni came up with a way to invert a cultured substrate of cardiac cells and position the complex on top of the probe device using a micro-manipulator. That way the bigger device chip remains fixed while the smaller cell substrate is free to move in all three dimensions.
The innovation has already paved the way for designing cyborg cells from silicon wafers that can track the contractions of individual muscle cells. What lies beyond is implanting neural chips and nano-scale pacemakers into the brain and heart - the seamless fusion of the body's own circuity with manufactured hardware.
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Tzahi Cohen-Karni
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Bozhi Tian
Tissue Engineered Vascular Graft
Craig Hashi and Yiqian Zhu knew that clogged and hardened blood vessels have been a critical problem in the healthcare industry. Typically, clogged vessels would be treated with a graft, often supplied from a vein or artery elsewhere in the patient’s body, to bypass the clog and restore normal blood flow. Hashi and Zhu understood that all too often, bypass grafts can fail, and synthetic grafts also have their limitations. So, the team worked together to experiment with a new kind of graft.
Hashi and Zhu took an FDA-approved polymer and created long, thin strands which were formed into a very thin mat. Then they seeded the mat with bone marrow stem cells, and once the cells had had a chance to grow, the mat was carefully rolled and formed into a tube. The tube — their graft — would then be ready to implant as a vascular graft, and as a fully-functioning blood vessel. Chances of rejection were greatly reduced because the patient’s own cells could be used to create the graft.
Hashi explained, "There are currently no tissue-engineered vascular grafts on the market. The idea of an off-the-shelf graft ready for the patient in time for surgery is exciting." He noted that it was helpful for him to step back and look at his projects with an engineering mindset. He remembered that as a youngster, it was natural for him to go into engineering because he was good at it, but it wasn’t until he was in graduate school that he developed his healthy respect for biology.
At the time of their participation in the Collegiate Inventors Competition, Hashi was a 24-year-old student living in Torrance, California, where his parents, Katsuo and Rumiko Hashi, owned a landscaping business. Hashi graduated from South High School in 1999, received his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from UCLA and had been working on his Ph.D. in bioengineering at Berkeley.
Zhu, originally from Shanghai, China, had been in the United States since 2003. A neurosurgeon by training, his expertise was instrumental in placing the grafts within the animal subjects and providing the medical knowledge needed to create the grafts. Zhu conducted all the in vivo techniques and looked forward to making their invention available on the market.
When asked about his childhood, Zhu said, "My parents would talk about medical things at dinner. They would take me to the hospital with them, and I began to know their world." Their influence was clear as Zhu went on to Fudan University Medical School, graduating with his medical degree in 1999. After four years working as a resident in training at Huashan Hospital, he traveled to the United States to undertake postdoctoral work at the University of California, San Francisco. At the time of our competition, Zhu was a 31-year-old student in the bioengineering program at Berkeley and San Francisco, working toward his Ph.D.
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Craig Hashi
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