Tools to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease and latent tuberculosis were among the winning projects in the “Design by Biomedical Undergraduate Teams” (DUBUT) prize challenge and competition. The teams developed prototypes of devices to advance technology and improve human health.
The DEBUT challenge with prizes worth $65,000 is supported by a public-private partnership between NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) https://www.nibib.nih.gov and VentureWell https://venturewell.org, a nonprofit higher education network cultivating promising inventions.
NIBIB’s first place prize for $20,000 went to a team from the University of Maryland that developed a device to help diagnose Alzheimer’s disease. Currently PET scans, MRIs, and spinal taps are the most commonly used methods to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease. Since these methods are expensive and can be invasive, so many patients are diagnosed based only on their symptoms.
The winning project incorporates a portable EEG that uses a specially designed headset and a new software analysis tool to detect Alzheimer’s disease before clinical symptoms are displayed.
The devices are able to observe changes in the brainwaves in response to special auditory tones. This device is a noninvasive and a relatively inexpensive tool with the potential to detect Alzheimer’s disease with a high level of accuracy.
The second place NIBIB prize of $15,000 was awarded to a team from Arizona State University for developing a 3D tracking-assisted functional region-mapping tool to help doctors perform brain surgery while a patient is awake.
Operating on an awake patient is often required for some surgeries since doctors must determine the precise location of critical brain regions in order to stimulate the region and observe the patient’s response.
The third NIBIB prize for $10,000 was awarded to a team from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore for their device called Treyetch. It was designed to facilitate the insertion of healthy cornea tissue grafts to help replace damaged tissue when surgeons are doing a corneal transplant procedure.
The Venture Prize for $15,000 was awarded by VentureWell to a team from George Mason University, in Virginia who designed a device to diagnose latent tuberculosis. This means that individuals may not currently have an active infection but may develop the infection in the near or remote future.
The team developed a paper-based immunoassay that uses nanoparticles to identify tuberculosis biomarkers in a urine sample. This could make diagnosis simple and inexpensive and help limit the spread of the disease.