Fellow teams focus in on innovations
The two Fellow teams (White Team:  Musculoskeletal and Red Team: Regenerative Medicine/Surgery) began their year with the daunting assignment of finding at least 200 technology innovation needs in their clinical area.   By November, each team had identified over 300 needs and had begun the process of validating and filtering down to their top dozen areas.   By January, they had made their selections:  the top several needs for the Fellow teams to pursue on their own, and another 8 to input into the Biodesign Innovation Class and the Medical Device Design and Evaluation class.

Joel Goldsmith of the White Team

The teams and classes are now in a phase of intensive brainstorming, looking for at least two or three good ways to approach each need.  The fellows have developed early prototypes of some of their concepts and are beginning to outline their strategies for patenting and FDA approval of their devices.

Kenneth Wu of the White team

2005-2006 Teams
Last year’s Biodesign Fellows proved again that teamwork and a methodical application of the Biodesign process can produce noteworthy results.   The Cardiovascular Team earned first place in the i-challenge (Innovator’s Challenge), sponsored by BASES, the Business Association of Stanford Engineering Students.  Their winning invention is a device and method that is designed to replace traditional holter monitoring (for recording rhythm disturbances of the heart).   This concept, patented through Stanford's OTL, has recently been licensed to a new start-up company.  Uday Kumar has taken the lead in further developing this intriguing approach. 

The Surgical Fellowship Team earned first runner-up and a $15,000 prize in the e-challenge competition, also sponsored by BASES.   The team designed a new, minimally invasive device to treat obstructive sleep apnea, a common and highly dangerous condition that has proven to be extremely difficult to treat.  The group also entered their business plan (for a proposed start-up company called "Apnyx") in the USF Business Plan competition where they received an honorable mention.  In a third major competition, the team was selected as a finalist in the MIT 50K competition, one of six surviving groups in a field of over 100 teams (a particularly noteworthy accomplishment for a Stanford-based team!). 

Continuing on for a second year, Biodesign Surgical Innovation Fellows Carlos Mery and Bilal Shafi are taking the next steps in the sleep apnea project and working on an additional project in heart failure.  Having a second year of fellowship was a concept introduced by Dr. Thomas Krummel, Chair of the Department of Surgery, who is also one of the core members of the Leadership Group in Biodesign.   The second year has been highly valuable, according to Bilal:   “Without the second year, we could not have capitalized on the project”

Todd Brinton Joins Biodesign
Former Biodesign fellow, Todd Brinton, was appointed a Lecturer in Bioengineering and has joined the interventional cardiology faculty of the Department of Medicine at Stanford University. Dr. Brinton also holds a clinical appointment at the Palo Alto VA hospital. He shares his time between clinical work with a focus on heart failure and new interventional therapies, focusing on pre-clinical and clinical work on adult stem cell therapy for myocardial restoration.  Additionally, he mentors the White Fellows team.   He is also the primary mentor for David Meister, who has recently joined the program as a Specialty Fellow under the auspices of the Med Scholars Program.  Dr. Brinton has also assumed a major role in planning and teaching the Biodesign Innovation Course this year with Paul Yock and Stefanos Zenios.

Lincoln Award

The 2006 Biodesign team in ME382 consisting of Chandra Mohan Jha, Grant Lee, JinHoon Park, Melanie Fox, and Gabriel Sanchez received the James F. Lincoln Gold Award (the top prize in this national competition) for their initial design of a new glaucoma preventing implant.  This is the second year in a row that the Biodesign-sponsored project in this class has taken the top award.  The class is taught by Prof. Tom Andriacchi of Mechanical Engineering.  Biodesign Fellow Jessica Conner was a mentor for the 2006 team.   The proposed device lowers ocular pressure by draining excess aqueous fluid from the anterior chamber.  A microprocessor monitors the eye pressure and holds it at a pre-determined healthy level. In addition, the device has the potential to prevent hypotony, or dangerously low eye pressure which is a side-effect of some currently available implants.

Upcoming Speakers

A new season starts off on March 5 with Dr. Frank Litvack, CEO of Conor Medsystems which has developed a revolutionary new drug-eluting stent technology.  Subsequent Workbench presentations are on April 3 with Mike Baker of ArthroCare, April 24 with Stephen Oesterle of Medtronic, and May 21 by Stephen MacMillan of Stryker.  As in past years, David Cassak, Managing Editor of In Vivo Magazine, will interview the guests.  The sessions are free for Stanford Faculty and Students.

Litvack, Baker, Oesterle, MacMillan

More information on the workbench is at http://innovatorsworkbench.stanford.edu

Craig Milroy, the Director of the Biodesign Collaboratory (and the captain of the "mothership," the Product Realization Laboratory in the School of Engineering), appointed Marlo Dreissigacker to be this year's teaching assistant in the Collab. Marlo is a second year Master’s student in Mechanical Engineering in the design division with a focus in Medical Device and Smart Product Design.   Marlo has taken the Collab to a new level of organization with the addition of a number of tutorials for the Fellows and students.

  Marlo Dreissigacker has been responsible for reorganizing the Collab this year.

In response to requests from a number of universities to site visit the Biodesign Program, we will host our first “Information Day” on May 4.  We will have the chance to review our approach to establishing Biodesign at Stanford and learn from other universities how they are planning to improve on the model! 

Mexican Fellows
Thanks to a planning grant awarded by the Presidential Fund for Innovation in International Studies, Biodesign is actively evaluating and "prototyping" approaches to applying the Biodesign teaching process in the context of developing nations. 

Prof Jack Linehan from Biodesign and Carlos Mery, second year Biodesign Surgical Fellow, have piloted a program in which a pair of distinguished young innovators from The Tecnologico de Monterrey, in Monterrey, Mexico, have joined us for a six-month "mini-fellowship"   The two Fellows, Santiago Torres-Ocejo [right] and Oscar Dominguez-Miranda [left] have been immersing themselves into the process of design thinking through both the core Biodesign Innovation class and a d.school class taught by Profs James Patel and James Beach entitled "Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability”.  The fellows will join student teams in traveling to Mexico in March to assess clinical needs in three rural and semi-urban health centers in order to start the process of developing affordable technology for these centers.

Stanford-India Biodesign (SIB)
In parallel to the Mexico pilot program, faculty from Biodesign are evaluating the possibility of developing a Biodesign program based in India.  These discussions followed the visit to Stanford last year of Dr. Raj Bhan, the Secretary of the Department of Biotechnology in India.  At Dr. Bhan's urging, faculty from Biodesign, in collaboration with Harry Greenberg, Senior Associate Dean in the School of Medicine, began an initial planning process for Stanford-India Biodesign (SIB).  Dr. Raj Doshi, a Stanford graduate in both engineering and medicine, was named Executive Director and Chris Kurihara from Biodesign as Associate Director.

In January, Drs. Greenberg, Doshi, Yock and School of Medicine Dean Phil Pizzo traveled to New Delhi to meet with Dr. Bhan and 25 leaders of engineering and medical schools in India to discuss the design of the SIB program.   If a funding commitment can be secured from the Indian Government, the plan is to develop a new fellowship team of Indian nationals who will perform their needs finding in India.  A major emphasis of the program will be to develop technologies directed to the needs of the 500 million Indians at the "bottom of the pyramid" economically.   The SIB program will be developed in conjunction with the Freeman/Spogli Institute for International Studies International Institute and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design.

Andy Grove "shifts left"

On November 2, 2006, over 400 members of the Stanford and Valley community jammed into the Arrillaga Alumni Center to hear Andy Grove (Intel Founder and Chairman) analyze the crisis in health care.   The event was organized by Dr. Thomas Krummel as a partnership between the Department of Surgery and Biodesign to honor one of the great medical technology innovators of our generation, Thomas J. Fogarty.

Dr. Grove presented a sobering outline of the unsustainability of current health expenditures.  Unlike many other analysts of this issue, however, Dr. Grove offered partial solutions -- in the form of two technology-based initiatives.  One, which he called the "shoebox on the web" for aggregating individual health care records using the internet, has recently been announced in pilot form as a collaboration between Intel, Wal-Mart and other companies.  Colleagues of Dr. Grove demonstrated the second initiative -- an intelligent home care environment to enable the elderly to stay safely and comfortably out of nursing homes. 

This fall the Fogarty Lecture will feature Casey McGlynn of Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosation October 19, 2007 in the Clark Center Auditorium from 4:00 - 5:00 pm. 

The Emerging Entrepreneurs program is a partnership between Stanford Biodesign and local venture capital and industry experts to provide an intensive and practical training experience and ongoing network for young innovators in med tech.  Last year, an initial group of 185 attendees (EE'05 cohort) met at Stanford for a two-day boot camp involving over 60 experts from different specialties the field.  This fall a reunion event featured a success story from two former Biodesign students in the EE'05 cohort, John MacMahon and Tom Goff.  These two engineering graduate students founded Kerberos, Inc. around an idea for removing clots from coronary vessels.   Lending realism to the story, Kerberos board members, Carl Simpson and Fred Khosravi shared their perspectives as key advisors.  Karen Boezi from Thomas McNerney & Partners, Rich Ferrari from DeNovo Ventures, and Casey McGlynn from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati led the Kerberos founders and advisors through discussions ranging from recruiting a powerful team to sharing the wealth fairly.  The Curriculum Committee for the 2006 EE Reunion event was comprised of EE 2005 participants, including Jeff Bleich, MD, Rajiv Doshi, MD, David Miller, Asha Nayak, MD, PhD, Jan Pietzsch, PhD, and Laura Wilkes-Evans.

On October 5 and 6, a second group of approximately 200 EEs will attend the kick-off workshop for the EE'07 cohort at the Arrillaga Alumni Center.   Over 30 industry and venture sponsors have already agreed to help sponsor and teach in the program.  Admission will be by application only.  Please email Sandy Miller if you would like to be notified once online applications are opened. sjmiller@stanford.edu.

Joe Knight, Uday Kumar, Kityee Au-Yeung, and John White file their first patent

The Biodesign Innovation Fellowship and associated elective course have generated intellectual property to address numerous medical issues, including:

• Obstructive Sleep Apnea
• Lung hyperinflation in Emphysema
• Prevention of Dilatation in Congestive Heart Failure
• Peripheral Vein identification
• Cardiac Ablation
• Improved Defibrillation
• Stroke Prevention in AF
• Cardiac Rhythm Monitoring
• Assessment of irreversible tissue alteration or destruction
• Assessment of blockages, narrowings and occlusions
• Left atrial appendage occlusion
• Implanted cardiac device for defibrillation

To learn more about Stanford medical device technologies available for licensing, contact Sandra Miller or visit the Office of Technology's searchable online database http://stanfordtech.stanford.edu/technology and click on the "medical devices" category. More than 150 technologies are currently posted.

For more information about Stanford medical device technologies available for licensing, please contact Sandra Miller at  sjmiller@stanford.edu; 650.736.1162.

Chicago Hosts the BME-IDEA Meeting for 2006
Again last year, the Stanford Biodesign faculty, led by Prof John Linehan, helped to organize a national meeting for sharing best practices in the teaching of innovation, design and entrepreneurship in biomedical engineering. Last year's meeting focused on ways for biomedical engineers to address clinical needs in underserved populations in US and developing countries. Funding for the meeting was provided by NSF, NCIIA and Guidant.  This year, the meeting will be in Hollywood, California, and will revisit best teaching practices as well as emphasizing the role of women biomedical engineers in innovation.

Web Portal bmesource.org  
We recently received a three-year grant from the Coulter Foundation to continue work on the editorial side of bmesource.  We are continuing to recruit editors to support the portal, and now have 107 Associate Editors from 77 universities.

Working with Ernest Stokely, Emeritus Professor of Biomedical Engineering from the University of Alabama, Birmingham, we have initiated a thorough review and re-assessment of the Engineering portion of the ontology of bmesource.  Prof Stokely interviewed experts in each of the main engineering technology areas that bmesource includes.  As a result, we have a much more thorough and logically-organized structure for the Engineering domain.  Similar work was done on the Business/Law portion of bmesource last year with much success.

John MacMahon, former student and co-founder of Kerberos Proximal Solutions, has recently been appointed CEO for Mitralign.

Want to stay informed?  Join the Biodesign-alumni mailing list to make sure you get all the news about Biodesign and related activities at Stanford and in the bay area.  Go to http://mailman.stanford.edu/lists/Biodesign-alumni and complete the form to get on our mailing list.

SSB has selected their slate of officers for the 06-07 year that includes Kevin Pan as co-president who will stay on for a few months to assist the two new co-leaders for this coming year, Sean Scanlan and Tabrez Ebrahim.