Biomedical Engineering


Exploiting the Synergy Between Engineering and Life Sciences
Exploiting the synergy between engineering and the life sciences, Draper is working on some of today’s most critical healthcare problems and partnering with leading medical and research institutions and pharmaceutical organizations to develop innovative diagnostics and therapies for clinical and defense needs.

Under contract to the military, Draper is developing technologies to address traumatic brain injury, massive internal hemorrhaging, detection of infectious pathogens like malaria, and rapid diagnosis of environmental pathogens and toxins. For healthcare at home, Draper is working on detection of epileptic seizures, early detection of the onset of sepsis, painless methods of monitoring hypoglycemia or hyperglycemia for diabetics, means to prevent hearing loss for patients undergoing chemotherapy, tools to remove vocal cord tumors while minimizing speech loss, and developing surgical instruments to remove diseased organs without breaking the skin.

Two programs are investigating means to develop very low-cost but rapid detection of active tuberculosis, a device that will be used in third-world countries. Draper is also supporting pharmaceutical and biological researchers in detecting drug toxicity to prevent illnessor death from new drugs, imaging systems that will accelerate the development of stem cells, and developing a sensor so small it can detect the effect of new drugs inside living cells.

Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Johns Hopkins Medical School, Tufts Medical School, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital are just some of the medical institutions with which Draper is collaborating.

The future holds much promise as the Laboratory looks to expand contributions to government agencies, commercial companies, and foundations, while helping the U.S. maintain the finest healthcare system in the world. Draper seeks to have its technologies in products and available to troops around the world, to care givers in sub-Saharan Africa, and to medical and pharmaceutical researchers within several years.

Implantable Therapeutics and Diagnostics
With advances made possible by implantable devices such as cochlear implants, stents, pacemakers, and defibrillators, medical science is poised for better solutions for organ replacement and implantable drug-delivery devices. Draper’s MEMS technology offers promising solutions for both needs.

For patients suffering from diseased organs such as the heart, lungs, liver, or kidney, the need for engineering artificial organs is pressing. Draper’s three-dimensional MEMS structures are enabling artificial organ development, minimizing blood clotting, maintaining cellular phenotype, efficiently distributing oxygen, and filtering toxins from these systems.

Draper’s MEMS technology also is showing promise as a new platform for human tissue models for early stage, high-throughput drug screening. It can address the problem the pharmaceutical industry is struggling with to establish functional cell culture models for evaluating the safety and efficacy of new compounds.

Point-of-Care (POC) Diagnostics
Rapid diagnosis of disease is important for patients and in reducing healthcare costs. Three technologies being developed at Draper hold potential for rapid POC diagnostics: breath analysis, MEMS chemical/biological sensing devices, and nanosensors.

Certain diseases manifest themselves in a person’s breath. While researchers have advanced the science of breath analysis of cardiac problems, diabetes, and other diseases, no products are readily available or suitable in size or simplicity to aid such diagnoses. Draper has simplified and miniaturized the detection and means to detect tuberculosis. Using technology partner Sionex’s ion mobility spectrometer, Draper is developing a hand-held device small enough to fit in a shirt pocket, accurate enough to detect emissions from bacteria in the lung, and cost effective enough for use with patients in the Third World. Most importantly, it can detect the disease in minutes.

Draper’s continued refinement of MEMS has led to the development of a number of successful sensors, such as ASES, a small sensor capable of detecting minute amounts of chemical or biological material. Current applications are being developed to detect tuberculosis in bodily fluids and other tropical diseases. Its small size will make it competitive with other low-cost detection technologies, yet it offers increased benefits in improved consistency and accuracy.

Draper’s smallest sensor is nano in size – so small it can fit benignly within a living cell. These sensors are being developed to assist pharmaceutical companies in evaluating new drugs. Further, implanted within human skin, they will be used to revolutionize the methods for continuously monitoring blood, eliminating the need for lancing to get samples.

Medical Informatics
Draper is integrating and applying its technologies in image analysis, signal processing, data mining, and visualization to create highly effective medical information systems. These systems are of value to researchers in automatically analyzing cellular behavior; to clinical trial managers looking for adverse affects of therapies in human subjects; and to physicians looking for trends indicating the onset of illness. Such powerful tools are advancing the extraction of valuable medical information in a timely manner.

 

Contact Information: busdev@draper.com