Winners announced in 2009 Collegiate Inventors Competition

Winners announced in 2009 Collegiate Inventors Competition

(Nanowerk News)A faster tool for cell programming and a new way of allowingquadriplegics to perform simple tasks have won grand prizes of the 2009 Collegiate Inventors Competition,a program of the National Inventors Hall of Fame sponsored by theAbbott Fund, the non-profit foundation of the global health carecompany Abbott, and the United States Patent and Trademark Office(USPTO). Harris Wang, who invented a new way of cell programming atHarvard Medical School, and Stephen Diebold, who invented the DropPoint tool for quadriplegics while at the University of Illinois atUrbana-Champaign, each received a $25,000 prize during theCompetition's culminating ceremony last night at the Museum of Scienceand Industry in Chicago.

Graduate and undergraduate winners were also announced for their topwork. Graduate winner Geoffrey von Maltzahn of the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology won for his advances in nanomedicine toincrease the effectiveness of cancer drugs, and the undergraduate teamof Philip Wagner, Lindsay Holiday, and Dana Leland of Dartmouth Collegewon for their electrocoagulation arsenic filter. As winners, vonMaltzahn and the Dartmouth team each received a $15,000 prize from thecompetition.

All student entries were scrutinized during an initial evaluationprocess by over 20 experts from industry, government, and academicresearch who judged the entries on the originality of the idea and thepotential value and usefulness of the invention to society. Then, onOctober 19th, nine chosen finalists presented their inventions to afinal panel of seven judges, including five inductees from the NationalInventors Hall of Fame and representatives from the USPTO and Abbott.

James West, a final phase judge and an inductee in the NationalInventors Hall of Fame for his invention of the electret microphone,said, "Once again, we're impressed by the outstanding caliber of thestudent inventions. We encourage college students to celebrateinvention as part of their science and technology research, and we'realso looking forward to seeing the impact of their work as theyprogress. I know that all the judges join me in commending thesestudents."

The prominent group of judges for this year's competition includes fiveNational Inventors Hall of Fame inductees: C. Donald Bateman (GroundProximity Warning System), Robert Bower (self-aligned gate MOSFET),Edith Flanigen (molecular sieves), Rangaswamy Srinivasan (excimer lasersurgery), and James West (electret microphone). In addition, thejudging panel includes Jeffrey Pan, Associate Director, ScientificInformatics and Automation, Global Pharmaceutical Discovery fromAbbott, and Jasemine Chambers, Group Director of Industrial Design fromthe USPTO.

"Abbott is proud to again be part of this competition that showcasesinnovation and foster broader understanding of science," explainedJeffrey Pan, Associate Director, Scientific Informatics and Automation,Global Pharmaceutical Discovery, Abbott. "Through our support of thecompetition, Abbott hopes to help inspire today's science students whomay go on to find tomorrow's cures and treatments for the world's mostserious diseases and health care challenges."

"The United States Patent and Trademark Office is pleased to be part ofthis outstanding young inventor recognition program," USPTO DirectorDavid Kappos commented. "Maintaining America's technological edge isvitally important in today's world economy. The highly talented andcreative collegiate inventors who participated this year renew myconfidence that this nation's innovative tradition will continue toendure. I congratulate all of the 2009 winners and wish them well intheir future endeavors."

The graduate grand prize winner, Harris Wang, 26, is a student in thelab of George Church, a researcher well-known for his attempts to makegenetic sequencing faster and cheaper. Church was long interested increating faster tools for cell programming and discovered that Wang waswilling to take on the challenge. Wang knew that cell programming wasstill a slow and hands-on process. He developed a protocol designed topermit faster cell programming, and then put together hardware andsoftware to automate it. He calls the approach MAGE: MultiplexAutomated Genome Engineering.

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To demonstrate, Wang engineered a strain of E. coli bacterium thatproduces lycopene, a red-colored antioxidant. He added the geneticrecipe for lycopene to the bacterium's chromosome. Then he used hisMAGE approach to evolve a strain of the bacteria in which production oflycopene was highly efficient. In a more traditional approach,researchers painstakingly isolate, snip apart, reassemble, and reinsertindividual genes. Wang believes that his technology will allowbioengineers to produce customized microorganisms much more cheaply andquickly than possible before. Such engineered microorganisms might beused to produce a wide variety of useful compounds, such asantibiotics, biofuels, and chemotherapy drugs. Born in China, Wang grewup in Salt Lake City and is currently working towards his doctorate inbiophysics.

Undergraduate grand prize winner Stephen Diebold, 21, from the Chicagosuburb of Rolling Meadows, designed an improved pointing stick for useby people with quadriplegia and other disabilities that prevent themfrom using their arms. Pointing sticks are used to type, operate cellphones, and otherwise manipulate objects. Existing pointing sticks aregripped in the user's teeth or mounted, helmet-like, on the user'shead. Either approach presents problems: a mouth-held pointer preventsthe user from speaking and a head-mounted pointer requires assistanceto put on or take off.

Diebold's Drop Point stick is designed to be donned and doffed with ashrug of the user's chin. He came up with the approach after spendingtime with then-law student Jonathan Ko, who has quadriplegia. Dieboldsaid, "I saw that to Jonathan, the pointing stick was his arms andhands, and he had to ask somebody every time he wanted to use hishands—that seemed absurd to me." By attaching the pointing stick to acup which is in turn attached to a strap that loops around the user'sneck, the user is able to freely engage the pointer as he wishes.Diebold is currently majoring in industrial design.

Graduate prize winner Geoffrey von Maltzahn, 29, turns what may be anew page in nanomedicine with his method of using a pair ofnanoparticles that work together in an innovative way to increase theeffectiveness and lower the side effects of existing cancer drugs.Powerful cancer-killing drugs are well-known to science and widely usedin clinical medicine, but since these drugs are also highly toxic tohealthy cells, targeting drugs specifically to tumors has been a majorfocus in cancer research. Of late, much of this drug-targeting researchhas looked at using nanoparticles to carry the drugs to tumors. A majorchallenge, however, is that cancer cells, and the tumors they may form,have a finite numbers of targets to which nanoparticles can attach—andsince a given nanoparticle can carry only a small drug payload, thislimits the amount of drug that can be delivered.

In von Maltzahn's approach, one set of nanoparticles lodge in a tumor'sblood vessels and cause local bleeding. The bleeding prompts clottingfactors to be produced, which in turn, attracts a second set ofnanoparticles that have been programmed to be attracted to the clottingfactors and that deliver a cancer drug. The use of the clotting factorsdramatically increases the number of targets for the drug-carryingparticles. Raised first in Arlington, Texas and then Fairfax, Virginia,von Maltzahn received degrees from MIT and the University ofCalifornia, San Diego before beginning his current work on a Ph.D. inmedical engineering and physics.

Undergraduate prize winners Philip Wagner, Lindsay Holiday, and DanaLeland tackled the problem of reducing arsenic found in groundwater tosafe levels, with a cheap, reliable device made of materials locallyavailable in rural Nepal. The team developed a way of usingelectrocoagulation—a process employed in the large-scale watertreatment plants of many modern cities—in a system radically downsizedto fit into three five-gallon buckets. Water to be treated goes intothe first bucket where the students induce electrocoagulation bysending a simple electric current through two steel plates in thewater. Iron precipitates are released. These iron particles bondaggressively with the arsenic that exists in the water. Thisnewly-reacted water is then poured into a second bucket of clean sand,which has a hole in the bottom and sits over a third empty bucket. Thesand collects the iron-arsenic particles and arsenic-free watercollects in the bottom bucket. When the team tested the device withwater contaminated with 200 parts per billion (ppb) arsenic, the outputwater contained under 1ppb arsenic—well under the 10 ppb levelconsidered safe for drinking.

Wagner, 22, grew up in Fogelsville, Pennsylvania; Holiday, 24, spenttime growing up in both Teec Nos Pos, Arizona in the Navajo Nation andPhoenix; and Leland, 22, is from Baltimore. All three are Spring 2009engineering graduates of Dartmouth College.

About the Collegiate Inventors Competition

The Collegiate Inventors Competition, a program of the NationalInventors Hall of Fame, encourages college students to be active inscience, engineering, mathematics, technology, and creative invention.The Competition specifically recognizes and rewards the innovations,discoveries, and research by college and university students and theiradvisors for projects leading to inventions that may have the potentialof receiving patent protection. Introduced in 1990, the Competition hasawarded more than $1 million to nearly 100 students for theirinnovative work and scientific achievement through the help of itssponsors.

                                                                                                                Source: National Inventors Hall of Fame