The Johns Hopkins team won second place in the Collegiate Inventors Competition

A team of Johns Hopkins University students was named runner-up in the undergraduate competition Team Inventors Competition 2024 for technology enabling improved fetal surgeries to treat life-threatening birth defects.

The winners of the annual competition were announced last week after the 10 finalists, consisting of 19 students from nine colleges and universities across the United States, presented their designs to competition judges at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in Alexandria, Virginia .

The Hopkins team includes biomedical engineering students Gloria Kalnitskaya, Ayeeshi Poosarla and Alice Yu; biomedical engineering graduate student Eric McAlexander; and Selena Shirkin, a master’s student at the Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design (CBID).

Team members are optimistic that success in the competition will be the beginning of even greater achievements.

“The funding is great, but the real reward is the patent accelerator, which will help us obtain a utility patent for our device much faster,” McAlexander said. “The connections we have made with experts from the USPTO and the National Inventors Hall of Fame, as well as other like-minded student innovators, will help us refine our intellectual property strategy.”

Doctors can perform minimally invasive surgery to correct a variety of birth defects and other conditions in babies before birth. Ultrasound-guided procedures involve access to the uterus through a port inserted through the mother’s abdomen, which allows instruments to be inserted through the port to perform fetal surgery.

Despite recent advances, fetal surgery is risky. For example, even a small rupture of the fetal membrane during surgery can lead to premature birth. Shirkin says the average complication rate for these procedures is 40%, at least in part because the surgical instruments currently used in fetal surgery were designed for other procedures.

The FetalCare port system developed by the student team is the first access port system designed specifically for the uterine environment. The system has two key features: a sharper insertion needle, also called an obturator, that can more precisely cut through the uterine wall, and a port cover that expands radially to allow surgeons to insert different-sized instruments into the uterus. The developers claim that the unique design of their system minimizes the risk of cell membrane rupture and enables safer and more effective fetal surgery.

“Our ultimate goal is to create a device that can reduce the risk of complications from 40% to zero,” Shirkin said. “We wanted to take our project far beyond the classroom because we are all passionate about the problem we are solving and the people we have the honor of working with.”

The project was created as part of the undergraduate team design program offered by the University of… Department of Biomedical Engineeringused by university schools of medicine and engineering. Elizabeth LogsdonDirector of the Biomedical Engineering Undergraduate Program and Ahmet Baschatdirector of the Johns Hopkins Center for Fetal Therapy and professor in the Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics, advised the team.

The Collegiate Inventors Competition, a program of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, recognizes and rewards research, innovation and discovery by students and their advisors on projects that lead to patentable inventions. Since its inception in 1990, the Johns Hopkins competition has featured 40 finalists.