Author: FORW-RD NRT

Prof. Greg Fischer, Mechanical Engineering, and his team have developed a robotic surgery tool that can perform minimally invasive procedures inside of an MRI. They created this robot using plastic parts and ceramic piezoelectric motors that boasts a low-noise control system that doesn’t cause electrical interference. The robotic tool is now being tested on human patients undergoing prostate biopsies at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital where the radiologists believe it will provide unprecedented accuracy. Read more about this amazing new research at IEEE Sprectrum.

“Monitoring the Progression of Spontaneous Articular Cartilage Healing with Infrared Spectroscopy”

Full citation: O’Brien MP, Penmatsa M, Palukuru U, West P, Yang X, Bostrom MP, Freeman T, Pleshko N. Monitoring the progression of spontaneous articular cartilage healing with infrared spectroscopy. Cartilage. 2015;6:174-184

To better understand the progression of cartilage healing, this work used Fourier transform infrared imaging spectroscopy (FT-IRIS) to analyze harvested repair tissue. The use of an infrared fiber-optic probe (IFOP) has the potential for translation to a clinical setting to provide beneficial information to surgeons trying to determine the quality of damaged cartilage in patients with joint injuries. In this study, we determined the feasibility of IFOP assessment of cartilage repair tissue and support further development of the IFOP technique for clinical applications.

Sarah Hernandez chosen to give a presentation at the Gordon Conference Cell Growth and Proliferation in Vermont, July 2015. She was awarded registration to the conference from waivers Nancy Gray donated to WPI earlier this year. Students were asked to write a one page description of how attendance at the conference would benefit their career, and Sarah was selected for 1 of the 10 waivers.

Christopher Nycz will be finishing his first year as an IGERT fellow conducting research in the Rehabilitation Engineering Lab (ReLab) at ETH Zurich, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He will be working under the guidance of Dr. Roger Gassert and Dr. Olivier Lambercy. His project at ETH and his project at WPI share a common goal but have two different designs to go about it. The goal of each is to use wearable robotic devices to aid in movement based therapy for hemiparetic stroke patients. These motion based therapies work to exploit the brain’s plasticity, building new connections between brain and limb leading to improved recovery of function. The project at WPI has taken the approach of a tendon driven, soft glove to perform these rehabilitation routines while ETH has a more rigid exoskeleton with a novel sliding spring mechanism to actuate the finger. Christopher’s goal this summer is to combine some of the desirable features of the WPI design with some of the desirable features of the ETH design. Specifically, he plans to develop a transmission system to remotely locate the motors of the ETH exoskeleton in a pack, removing excess weight from the weakened limb. This will combine the benefits of remote actuation present in the WPI design with the exoskeleton design of ETH which doesn’t require the placement of hardware on the palm of the hand. Overall this should be a step towards a more clinically viable device, one that minimizes the obtrusiveness of the device to the individual wearing it while not detracting from its functionality.

The Harvard Club in Boston hosted the Massachusetts Life Sciences Innovation Day (MALSI) on June 2, 2015, where Sarah Hernandez presented a poster. MALSI focuses on bringing people with early concept life science ideas together with innovators, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists. It blends the typical conference setting with networking to foster start ups and innovation in Massachusetts.

Congratulations to IGERT student Katrina Hansen for receiving an Alfred R. and Janet H. Potvin Award. The award is given to outstanding graduate and undergraduate students in biomedical engineering. Katrina was one of three students to receive the award this year.

Alfred Potvin was an EE undergraduate student at WPI in 1960-64, and has enjoyed a varied professional career in BME in both academia and industry. He founded the BME program at The University of Texas at Arlington as a joint program with the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and served as its first Chairman. Today, it has over 175 graduate students. He also founded and served as Director of the Medical Instrument Systems Division at Eli Lilly and Company in Indianapolis, and concluded his career as Dean of Engineering and Technology at Indiana University and Purdue University at Indianapolis where he developed the foundation for its BME Department with the IU Medical Center and Purdue University in West Lafayette. He also served as a member and as a Chairman of the advisory committee for the BME Department at WPI during Dr. Bob Peura’s tenure as Department Chairman.

Sarah Hernandez recently attended the Gordon Conference Cancer Genetics and Epigenetics in Tuscany, Italy where she presented a poster titled “Novel PRMT8 isoform is essential for cell viability”. Sarah was awarded registration to the conference for winning the i3 Best Presentation award in 2014.

On April 14, 2015 The Venture Forum held it’s annual 5 minute Pitch Contest where the 10 finalist are given 5 minutes to pitch their buisness to a panel of judges. VitaThreads, a company that began based on the work of  WPI prof. Glenn Gaudette and George Pins, was awarded second place and a $1,500 cash prize.  AMProtection, a company started by students Lindsay Lozeau and Todd Alexander was awarded the top prize of $500 in the poster competition for the second year in a row.

On April 13, the annual WPI graduate research celebrations came to a dramatic conclusion as more than 60 finalists faced off in the tenth annual Graduate Research Innovation Exchange (GRIE) poster competition and 11 master’s and PhD candidates made their pitches in the finals of the i3: Investing in Innovations with Impact presentation contest. During the first part of the afternoon, the Rubin Campus Center Odeum was full of excitement as the GRIE finalists, chosen by judges from among the more than 210 graduate students who displayed their posters at the GRIE poster celebration in December, explained their research to guests and judges. Based on the judges’ scoring, Three IGERT students were awarded cash prizes of $100 for their 2^nd place finish. In the Engineering category was Christopher Nycz and in the Life Sciences and Bioengineering there was a tie between Megan O’Brien and Lindsay Lozeau.

At the conclusion of GRIE, the i3 finalists, who made it through several rounds of presentations, took to the stage and presented their pitches and answered questions to a panel of distinguished judges. The students explained in just three minutes, and without visuals, how their research innovations can be translated into value in the marketplace. The judges chose one winner from each category-Best Presentation and Best Concept for which they were awarded a $750 cash prize. The Best Concept winner was IGERT fellow Heather Cirka who pitched “Controlled in Vitro Models for Calcific Aortic Valve Disease”

2014 Kalenian award winner Sarah Hernandez credits the National Science Foundation IGERT fellowship she received in 2012 for sparking connections between a biomarker and commercial potential. The Kalenian Award—named for the late Aram Kalenian ’33, an inventor—evaluates the novelty of a competitor’s concept; its potential in the commercial market; how a business plan could evolve from the idea; and the likelihood of its success. With the foundations of the research already in place, Hernandez and Prof. Dominko applied for the award, looking at their lab findings from a different angle and incorporating them into a plan for commercialization.

Their discovery of an enzyme that appears to be involved in helping stem-like cells—or cancer cells that have characteristics like normal stem cells—stay alive and continue dividing. “Sarah made a connection,” says Dominko of the enzyme discovery. “She speculated that the new enzyme could also be present, at the very early stages of cancer formation, helping those cells stay alive and divide. If so, then a blood test to check for this biomarker could become an important early diagnostic tool.” Their research has a revolutionary potential to develop screens and treatments for a disease that patients have yet to develop. “We have termed this change in phenotype ‘induced regeneration competence’, or iRC,”says Hernandez. Checking for the presence of the enzyme could potentially take the place of colonoscopies as a diagnostic procedure for cancer, she says, and change preventive medicine.