From popsicle sticks to improved medical care

This post is part of the Biodesign’s Jugaad series following a group of Stanford Biodesign fellows from India. (Jugaad is a Hindi word that means an inexpensive, innovative solution.) The fellows will spend months immersed in the interdisciplinary environment of Stanford Bio-X, learning the Biodesign process of researching clinical needs and prototyping a medical device. The Biodesign program is now in its 14th year, and past fellows have successfully launched 36 companies focused on developing devices for unmet medical needs

Shashi Ranjan, PhD, and Harsh Sheth, MD, fiddled with popsicle sticks and tiny wires in the final throes of prototyping possible biodesign solutions for two medical needs: fixing pacemaker leads or improving catheter urine drainage.

The popsicle stick device hardly looked like something that would inspire confidence in a person undergoing surgery, but if it worked and could be miniaturized and made out of more durable materials it could provide a solution for the pacemaker leads that are prone to coming unfixed after they are inserted.

The team had narrowed their search down from the 315 medical needs they had originally identified using a weighted matrix of requirements. Sheth told me that what stood out about addressing the final two needs was the large number of people who could benefit, lack of other solutions and lack of competing products.

All of those add up to a product that could inspire venture funding and eventual development, which is the goal of the biodesign process.

Sheth said the prototypes they were building now would help determine which of the two needs the group eventually chose to address, and how. They had four ideas to try out for the pacemaker leads and five ideas for improving urine drainage. “We’ll know which of these ideas have value after this step,” Sheth told me.

The group (which includes Debayan Saha, who was elsewhere during this prototyping session) returns to India after the Stanford phase of the fellowship ends in June. At that point they’ll repeat the process of identifying medical needs and prototyping solutions in India. Sheth and Ranjan said they hope to have patents in place for their Stanford prototype, with the idea of potentially returning to it after the fellowship.

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