Medtech companies on the hunt for new product ideas and engineering talent would do well to pay attention to the winners of the Biomedical Engineering Innovation Design and Entrepreneurship Awards (BMEidea), a new showcase competition for students involved in developing medical products.

Winners of the inaugural BMEidea competition were announced in June, during the Medical Design Excellence Awards (MDEA) ceremony at the Medical Design & Manufacturing (MD&M) East exposition in New York City.

The BMEidea competition recognizes excellence in student biomedical innovation. Winning teams at this year's competition were selected from a pool of entries submitted by some of the nation's top biomedical engineering departments, and were judged by a panel of experts in medicine, engineering, patent law, and business.

“One of the goals of the BMEidea competition is to increase awareness of academic biomedical engineering design programs and activities within the medical device industry. Presentation of the awards for the student competition during the MDEA awards ceremony helped accomplish this goal by providing industry exposure for the competition and the winning student teams,” said Jay R. Goldberg, PhD, director of the healthcare technologies management program at Marquette University (Milwaukee, WI), and cocreator of the BMEidea competition.

Accepting the inaugural BMEidea awards on behalf of their teams (from left): Elizabeth Tran (Washington University, St. Louis), Ashkon Shaahinfar (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore), and Amy Lee (Stanford University; Palo Alto, CA).

The first-place team, from Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA), received a $10,000 cash prize in recognition of its work. The team has developed the Embolune, a novel treatment for cerebral aneurysms. The microporous balloon device helps reduce the risk of aneurysm treatment. The team also developed a method to create a permanent clot that prevents further aneurysm growth. At the awards ceremony, team member Amy Lee said that the competition offered “a nice culmination of a year of working on the project and trying to find ways to promote it and to raise funding. The students involved in this project do it all on their own time. It's nice to be recognized for all our work.”