CBID Projects Selected for Tech Funding
Designed to enhance the success rate of spinal surgery, the students’ device uses a bone graft from the patient’s own body, retrieved in a safer and less expensive and less painful manner.
A Maryland corporation established to help accelerate the commercialization of new technologies has awarded nearly $300,000 to three Johns Hopkins-related projects that hold promise for ushering new medical devices to the marketplace.
In its first round of investments, the Maryland Innovation Initiative (MII) on Dec. 19 awarded three awards to BOSS Medical LLC, a Johns Hopkins University start-up company, and to two School of Medicine faculty members who are working on other medical devices.
Boss Medical, which is developing a novel way to harvest bone graft in a minimally invasive way, received a $99,860 award. Edith Gurewitsch Allen, an associate professor of gynecology/obstetrics in the Division of Maternal Fetal Medicine, was given $99,818 to support her research concerning an umbilical cord blood collection device. The third award, for $100,000, went to Kieren A. Marr, a professor of medicine, who is studying a new point-of-care diagnostic device for lung infections.
Two of these projects – the Boss Medical and cord blood system – originated as Johns Hopkins student devices in the Department of Biomedical Engineering’s Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design (CBID). CBID offers a master’s degree program aimed at developing innovative biomedical devices for the global marketplace. The biomedical engineering department is jointly administered by the university’s Whiting School of Engineering and School of Medicine.
Boss Medical is developing a system to enhance the success rate of a spinal surgery procedure by using a using a bone graft from the patient’s own body, retrieved in a less expensive, safer, and less painful manner.
