Students Win “Cure it!” Prize

Top row from left: Siddharth Iyer, Mathias Insley, Eric Lin. Bottom row from left: Jasmine Hu, Diane Lee

The Lemelson-MIT nationwide program recognizes and inspires young STEM inventors. This year, they awarded $75,000 to three undergraduate teams and three individual graduate student inventors in several categories, which include healthcare, transportation and mobility, food/water and agriculture, and consumer devices.

Team Augeo, which includes Siddharth Iyer, Jasmine Hu, Mathias Insley, Diane Lee, and Eric Lin, are materials science and engineering undergraduate students at The INBT and were awarded $10,000 under the “Cure it!” category. This category recognizes healthcare technology-based inventions. Winners were selected based on the overall inventiveness of their work, the invention’s potential for commercialization or adoption, and youth mentorship experience. The team’s invention draws attention to treating hemorrhages and embolisms that occur during surgery. Internal bleeding affects millions of people worldwide, and the only current solution is to use platinum coils, which is expensive, difficult to use, and does not universally fit every blood vessel size. Augeo’s innovative flexible and inexpensive spongelike material can quickly expand to many times its size by filling with blood, resulting in a low cost, simple solution that permanently stops bleeding in the many blood vessel sizes throughout the body.

Go to inbt.jhu.edu and watch the video about team Augeo’s invention.