Texas Children’s work to develop a novel non-invasive device for pediatric ureteral stent removal after a urinary tract procedure, with Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) and Department of Bioengineering, as well as local life sciences commercialization firm Fannin Innovation Studio, was recently funded by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The $225,000 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant will be used to conduct further development of an electromagnetic device for removal of ureteral stents in pediatric patients.
Through the Rice undergraduate design program, a group of Rice University engineering students collaborated with Dr. Chester Koh, a pediatric urologist and surgeon at Texas Children’s and Baylor College of Medicine, to create the device in 2015, after Koh challenged the students to develop an innovative tool that would simplify ureteral stent removals, a fairly common procedure that is performed on more than 2,000 pediatric patients nationwide each year.
After extensively collaborating with Texas Children’s surgeons to better understand the challenges of the current procedure and the need for refinement, the collaborative team developed a non-invasive device to remove ureteral stents from children using a small magnetic bead and a powerful custom-built electromagnet that was designed with the assistance of 3-D printing at Rice’s OEDK labs. The electromagnet safely pulls on the tiny metallic bead that is attached to the ureteral stent to allow passage through the urethra without the need for an invasive procedure or general anesthesia.
This new innovation in pediatric ureteral stent removal is less painful and costs two-thirds less than the standard procedure because it avoids general anesthesia and the time and equipment necessary for a surgical procedure. The team’s invention has won two significant awards: the top prize at Rice University’s 2016 annual Engineering Design Showcase and the Grand Prize for Student Design at the 2016 annual Design of Medical Devices conference in Minneapolis.
“The development of pediatric medical devices lags adult device development by more than 10 years,” said Koh, who has a mechanical engineering degree from the University of California, Berkeley. “This is an important example of why academic partnerships are needed to advance pediatric medical device projects, since the pediatric medical device pipeline is currently limited. I applaud the Rice and Fannin Innovation Studio team members for showing their dedication and passion to the kids under our care at Texas Children’s.”
Prior to coming to Texas Children’s to establish the robotic surgery program in 2013, Koh co-founded a U.S. Food and Drug Administration-supported pediatric device consortium based in Southern California. He is creating a similar initiative at Texas Children’s, drawing on the top engineering and device development talent in the region.
The early work for this project was supported by the Denton A. Cooley Fellowship for Surgical Innovation of the Texas Children’s Auxiliary and by the Texas Children’s Department of Surgery, which continues to support the pursuit of innovation solutions to the unmet surgical needs of children.
The SBIR Phase I grant from the NIDDK will allow the team to implement design modifications to further refine the device as well as perform benchtop and pre-clinical studies with a target goal of larger SBIR Phase II grants.