Stanford students win bioengineering award for designing a new treatment for cerebral aneurysms

By Latice Strickland

Six Stanford University students have been named winners of the first Biomedical Engineering Innovation Design Award (BMEidea) competition. The team was awarded $10,000 by the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA) for inventing a novel way to treat cerebral aneurysm—a bulging weak spot on an artery in the brain that, if ruptured, may cause seizures and even death.

"There is about a 50 percent mortality rate three months post the first rupture and a 98 percent mortality rate three months after re-rupture," says Stanford team member and engineering graduate student Neema Hekmat. There are enough procedural risks and potential side effects with conventional treatments that some patients choose to live with the possibility of rupture rather than have their aneurysm treated, he adds.

Recognizing the need for a lower-risk treatment, Hekmat and his student colleagues responded by designing a porous balloon mechanism, which they christened Embolune. To use the new invention, a surgeon navigates the balloon to the site of the aneurysm, where it is detached. A hardening polymer substance is then released into the aneurysm space to create a permanent clot and stifle further growth.

Although Embolune is still being tested, Hekmat says that the treatment shows commercial promise. "With the recent advances in noninvasive imaging to detect cerebral aneurysms, we are likely to witness a large jump in the rate of people found to be afflicted with this vascular disorder," he adds.

Other student members of the award-winning team are Pete Johnson, Amy Lee, Lipkong Yap, Manik Chhabra and Jason Buelow. Their faculty adviser is Paul Yock, the Martha Meier Weiland Professor in the Stanford School of Medicine and Professor of Bioengineering. The group was sponsored by the Stanford Biodesign Program, an interdisciplinary faculty-student collaboration whose mission is to promote the invention and implementation of new health technologies.

Based in Hadley, Mass., the NCIIA is an alliance of about 200 colleges and universities in the United States that was established in 1995 to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship in higher education.

Latice Strickland is a science-writing intern at the Stanford News Service.

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