Alumni team wins big at biomed competition

By Viola Hsia     10/1/24 10:43pm

A team of Rice bioengineering alumni recently  won first place — and $20,000 — in a nationwide biomedical engineering competition, organized by the National Institute of Health.

The team won for their device, UroFlo, a device that addresses continuous bladder irrigation (CBI), often used to treat hematuria, or blood in the urine. Team member Sahana Prasanna ‘24 said that the device automates the usually-manual process of monitoring CBI, making it easier for healthcare workers to stay “informed of patient status — even remotely,” Prasanna wrote in an email to the Thresher.  

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Raymond Yong, one of the team’s advisors, said that this device helps healthcare providers track CBI in multiple patients at the same time, often necessary during a busy shift.

“This device will really help alleviate a lot of the issues that we run into when staff are really busy helping out other patients that have critical needs,” Yong said, “and may or may not have time to monitor the irrigations as much as it sometimes requires.”

The device began as the team’s biomedical engineering capstone project. Team member Anushka Agrawal said that they created the device with the help of their faculty advisor, Sabia Abidi, as well as Chester Koh, Sagar Patel and Yong, all urologists at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas’ Children’s hospital.

“For the first few weeks of our capstone, we conducted a lot of background research and all came together with ideas on what we wanted our device to look like,” Agrawal wrote in an email to the Thresher. 

Team member Archit Chabbi said that they used many of Rice’s facilities, particularly the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, to develop the device.

“Having readily available access to so many tools and resources has played a major part in our quick prototyping and iterating on our design,” Chabbi wrote in an email to the Thresher.

“We’ve really enjoyed working on a project that has real-world applications with the potential to save healthcare workers nights of stress,” fellow team member Kevin Li also wrote to the Thresher. “The most rewarding part of it for us is seeing how excited urologists are for our solution, and that really drives us to keep pushing the project forward.”

Koh, who is also the executive director of the Southwest-Midwest National Pediatric Device Innovation Consortium, said UroFlo will help aid the pediatric community.

“This is an example of necessary partnerships for engineering and medicine to come together to build their devices, in this case, for an underserved population, which is the pediatric population,” Koh said.

As far as UroFlo’s future, the team says they’re considering bringing UroFlo to the start-up level.

“Since graduating, we’ve spoken to health providers across the country in hopes of bringing our device to market,” team member Richard Chan wrote to the Thresher. “While the future of UroFlo continues to evolve, one thing remains certain: our device has the potential to make a meaningful difference to nurses, urologists and the 600,000 patients who undergo CBI annually, and we’re committed to pursuing every reasonable path forward.”

Team member Robert Heeter said that he looks forward to the future of the device after its competitive success.

“About one year ago, at the beginning of the fall semester, we had no idea how far this project would go and the success we would have in these competitions,” Heeter said. “Seeing our dedication and the support of our peers, faculty and mentors being recognized and rewarded has been incredibly exciting.”

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