YOUR

IMPACT

THE BERBEEWALSH PROTOTYPE PATHWAY

F E A R L E S SS C I E N C E

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Financial Snapshot

W I T H YO U R S U P P O R TDear Jim and Karen,

Your investment is making a difference at the Morgridge Institute for Research. The BerbeeWalsh Prototype Pathway harnesses the tenacity of young student engineers to help clinicians solve real-world problems that improve human health.

As we prepared this Impact Report for you, it reminded us how much students are at the center of this story. Our clinician colleagues are critical partners and the engineering staff and scientists across the university are an amazing source of support and ideas – but the most important component and outcome of your investment is training the next generation. With your support, the Pathway teaches student engineers to take their creativity, apply it to problems and use their Badger tenacity to make it possible.

Looking ahead, we are excited to build on our partnership in the Department of Biomedical Engineering in the College of Engineering. This partnership has created a pipeline to bridge students from the classroom to the Fab Lab to gain hands-on experience creating medical devices with clinicians and leading to additional clinical collaborations.

We also began working directly with WARF on identifying clinical inventors who we can help make disclosure a reality through student engineer involvement.

Your support has made all this a reality and I can’t wait to see where we go next. I hope you enjoy learning more about the biomedical engineers you’ve helped inspire.

Thank you for your investment at the Morgridge Institute.

Kevin W. Eliceiri, PhD PI and Director Fab Lab

Investigator, Morgridge Institute for Research Director, Laboratory for Optical and Computational Instrumentation

University of Wisconsin at Madison

THIS FINANCIAL OVERVIEW COVERS THE PERIOD FROM DECEMBER 31, 2015 THROUGH DECEMBER 31, 2016.

CUMUL ATIVE GIFT AMOUNT

$165,000

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The Little ThingsDisposable Video Laryngoscope Lens Clearing and the

Force Sensing Devices tackle intubation challenges

Sometimes it’s the little things that make the difference. For clinicians, this could be as “little” as effectively and safely using a video device during a procedure. It could also be a question of applying force – how much is too much for a patient? How much is too little?

Anneka Littler, an alumna of the UW-Madison biomedical engineering program and member of the BerbeeWalsh Prototype Pathway team, got first-hand experience thinking about the little things in clinical practice. Over the past year, Littler worked on two projects – a Disposable Video Laryngoscope Lens Clearing Device and the Force Sensing Device – where the concept of “little things” were central to two new medical devices.

On the video lens project, Anneka teamed up with Dr. Michael Steuerwald in the Department of Emergency Medicine.

Dr. Steuerwald, who also works on the Med Flight, needed a device to remove particulate, like blood and vomit, from a video laryngoscope during intubation in trauma situations. The device had to work quickly, effectively and safely to clean a video lens – in addition to being small, sterile and easily maneuverable.

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YOUR IMPACT

To design such a device, Anneka needed to rapidly prototype designs. She points to rapid fabrication as one of the most important resources in the Fab Lab.

“The tools of the Fab Lab allow us to fail often, fail fast, and fail cheap so that we can efficiently and effectively solve problems,” she says.

Working with engineering specialists George Petry and Robert Swader, Anneka was also the lead on the Force Sensing Device, a collaboration with Dr. Chris Ford. The device, a disposable laryngoscope, alerts physicians when 10 pounds of pressure has been applied to a patient’s teeth during intubation.

Dr. Ford saw a need to help physicians, particularly those early in their medical careers, learn how to apply the right amount of pressure. Not only is the device instructional, but its training use could help reduce possible patient harm, particularly to teeth during intubation.

Together, Anneka and Dr. Ford worked through several iterations of the Force Sensing Device to create a working prototype.

“Even though we live in an age of endless new technologies, it is often the simple design that proves tried and true,” she adds.

And what’s the critical ingredient for success? Anneka points to several – clinician enthusiasm, her mentor George, and a mix of her own hard and soft skills including medical device fabrication and design, project management and communication.

“Those were invaluable skills,” Anneka says.

Now, as a graduate of the program, she’s putting those skills to work as a hardware staff engineer at GE Healthcare in LUNAR Bone Densitometry. Both devices have been disclosed to WARF and are currently in clinical testing at the UW Hospital.

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“The tools of the Fab Lab allow us

to fail often, fail fast, and fail cheap

so that we can efficiently and

effectively solve problems.”

ANNEKA LITTLER, BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING GRADUATE (2016)

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Organ Cooler Project advances to clinical trialsReed Bjork takes on the next steps

The Organ Cooler Project moved to the next stage this past year advancing to clinical trials in primate kidney transplantation.

The project, a novel cold transfer integrated table that improves the backbench procedure during organ transplantation, was created by a team of four biomedical engineering students including Reed Bjork, Annie Yang, Monse Calixto and Alex Craig working with Dr. Dixon Kaufman, Chair of Transplantation in the UW-Madison School of Medicine & Public Health, Fab Lab Director Dr. Kevin Eliceiri and senior Fab Lab staff engineers Robert Swader and George Petry beginning in 2015.

For Reed Bjork, who started on the project as an undergraduate and continued during his master’s program, the Organ Cooler Project has been a continual learning process.

“The best part about working on this project has been the new and unexpected experiences,” he says. “When I started on the project, I didn’t see myself sitting in a WARF office describing the intricacies of our device so they could be illustrated in a patent, or standing in the operating room of a nonhuman primate kidney transplant.”

He worked closely with Rob and George, engineering experts who mentor students on BerbeeWalsh projects and many others.

Reed, who completes his graduate degree in December and plans to pursue medical school, says the process has been an incredible opportunity.

“I think what surprised me most while working on the project, and still fascinates me today, is just the simple concept that an idea that once only existed in your mind could become something very real, functional and even useful to others,” he says.

Reed adds that clinicians – particularly their passion and excitement – bring a refreshing perspective. “That,” he adds, “continues to remind me about what the true purpose is in a humanely, patient-driven sense.”

And after medical school? Reed says he wants to combine both medicine and instrumentation design into his career.

The project, which helped inspire a group of young biomedical engineers, now moves to the next stage having been accepted as a disclosure at WARF with a manuscript on its design now written. The device will soon transfer to Dr. Kaufman’s lab by end of 2017 for use during primate surgery and eventual clinical trials.

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HALO Device zeroes in on the pathology of tinnitusKayla Huemer puts her electrical engineering skills to work

When Kayla Huemer finished her fourth year at UW-Madison she had already checked a lot off her list:

X She played trombone for four years in the UW Marching Band. X She had studied abroad over the summer and worked on medical devices in India. X She interned as an electrical engineer at Accuray, a radiation oncology company in Middleton, Wisconsin.

X She’d gained medical device experience in the Fab Lab creating the ZWEDGI, a now widely used zebrafish wounding device in partnership with Jayne Squirrell, a senior research scientist in the Eliceiri Lab, and Professor Anna Huttenlocher in the Department of Medical Microbiology & Immunology.

But Kayla wasn’t going to slow down in her fifth and final year.

When the opportunity came to hone her skills in electronics and fabrication through the BerbeeWalsh Prototype Pathway, she jumped. She was selected to work on a project with Dr. Burke Richmond in the Department of Surgery that was directly introduced to Fab Lab Director Kevin Eliceiri by WARF as a result of Dr. Richmond’s invention disclosure.

Their goal? Create a novel device to better identify noises in the brain for patients suffering from tinnitus. The project aims to create a new instrument to better understand the pathology of tinnitus, a disorder that causes repetitive and often debilitating noises in a patient’s brain. Those noises can be classified as subjective (hallucinated) or objective (observable by another person).

With the HALO Device, Dr. Richmond hopes to give patients and their doctors a way of better understanding the sounds of objective tinnitus. For Kayla, the HALO Device gave her an opportunity to dive deeply into a clinical problem.

“My favorite part is meeting with clinicians,” she says. “It’s such a unique perspective to hear clinicians talk about their interactions with patients on a daily basis – it reminds me of the big picture every time.”

Kayla says this opportunity was unique – the independence gave her the flexibility to reach out to professors and faculty members for advice and make connections to improve the design. She also put her electronics skills to the test to develop a way to assess the device’s feasibility and assist clinicians in developing innovative therapy solutions. The HALO Device is now being used on test models of tinnitus.

Looking ahead, Kayla hopes to take her passion for medical device design back to India. She’s submitting a Fulbright application this semester and hopes to continue her path helping clinicians develop novel devices to improve human health.

YOUR IMPACT

9KAYL A HUEMER, 5TH YEAR SENIOR IN BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING, BIOINSTRUMENTATION

THE DISCOVERY BUILDING / 330 N. ORCHARD STREET, MADISON WI 53715

608.316.4100 / MORGRIDGE.ORG

“Clinicians are genuinely passionate and excited. They bring a refreshing perspective that continues to remind me about what the true purpose is in a

humanely, patient-driven sense.”

- REED BJORK GRADUATE STUDENT IN THE BERBEEWALSH PROTOTYPE PATHWAY