The prototyping stage of any device is a never-ending cycle of designing, building, presenting, meeting and repeating. Unfortunately, the time in which one does actual prototyping is significantly shorter relative to the time spent meeting and discussing everyone’s plans and intentions. As of Friday morning, I completed a functional prototype for the device and learned that the most important part of prototyping is making sure everyone is imagining the same design. Too many times during a meeting people will say the words “that’s what I was thinking” only to find out that they envisioned something completely different in their mind’s eye -after a mock-up has been 3D printed. Low-fidelity prototyping is used to build a three dimensional design of the device with inexpensive materials (e.g. paper, pipe cleaners, glue, etc.) that is not meant to be functional, but instead tell the story of the device. Essentially, a tangible sketch. After everyone understands the intended look and function of the device, then you can then build the functional, or pseudo-functional, devices.
As the summer is nearing its end, we’ve begun thinking about our upcoming implementation projects for when we return to Houston. I will be the Team Lead for the Stent-X project. Stent-X is a novel idea that will be used in pediatric patients suffering from ureteropelvic junction obstruction, or UPJO, to maintain urinary flow. Typical urinary stents are removed through an invasive procedure via cystoscopy. Because this type of procedure can be quite uncomfortable and stressful for young patients, it is typically completed under general anesthesia. According to an FDA report, repeated exposure of adolescents to anesthesia may be harmful to their cognitive development. The Stent-X project seeks to design a pediatric urinary stent that can be removed without the need for an invasive procedure.Students last year, along with partners at Texas Children’s Hospital and Fannin Innovation Studio, developed the idea of an electromagnetic tether to pull the stent out. The current model has shown promising results in cadaver and preliminary animal studies, but I’m exciting to delve deeper into the project and develop it even further !
We’ve been alternating the coast and altitude when it comes to our Costa Rican weekend adventures and this weekend we opted for altitude. We woke up at an obscene hour on Saturday morning to drive up to the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve and spent the weekend hiking in the rain and flying through the clouds. We spent the majority of Saturday at the reserve, hiking through the picturesque Latin American jungle -exactly what anyone would picture when asked to think of a rainforest, but our hiking adventure did not stop there! We kept hiking into the night with a guided tour and saw some incredible creatures. I’m not sure what time the guides have to wake up to place animals outside, nor how they do so, but it is the only explanation I have for how a guide can walk for 5 minutes, say “Look a Sloth!” and point 100 meters to a brown blob in the trees and actually see a sloth in pitch-black lighting. With the guides’ help, we were able to find boa constrictors, a sloth, a kinkajou, scorpions, tarantulas and red-eyed frogs.
A true glimpse into what the world looks like through the eyes of one with a degree in cell biology, my favorite creature was the scorpion, because when you shine a UV lamp on it, it glows! Now, of course I like shiny things and pretty lights, but the real reason this was my favorite creature is because it glows due to the expression of a class of oxidoreductase enzymes called luciferase enzymes (or “light bringing” enzymes in Latin). This is an exciting example of natural bioengineering. These fluorescent enzymes have provided the world with countless means of gene reporting and protein quantification through the engineering of artificial proteins that use luciferase mechanisms (as seen in the scorpion!). Too often people pigeonhole the term bio/biomedical engineering to refer to the design of macro-medical devices (heart valves, hearing aids, etc.), but bioengineering also encompasses the field of molecular engineering. In other words, building artificial nanomachines from already present molecular mechanisms (proteins and their pathways).
On Sunday morning, we decided to go back to the jungle and enjoy nature, but this time from 200m in the air. We went on a series of zip line tracks (one being the largest in Latin America) that stretched between mountains. A few of them even required us be tethered on our stomachs in a superman position. At one point, our speed was clocked at a little over 55 kph and I literally felt like I was flying. To end the day, we jumped of the “Mega Tarzan Swing” which consisted of us jumping off a bridge spanned between two mountains, free-falling and then being “caught” by a rope that we used to swing on like Tarzan. To sum up, the week was spent prototyping, hiking, molecular biology-ing and flying. I have no idea how we’ll top it next week.