Introduction: What is BIE?
Welcome to the UC Berkeley Biodesign Immersion Experience blog! For the summer of 2016, the cohort consists of 3 fellows and 5 protégés. We started researching on May 31, but before we talk about our experiences in BIE, we’d like to explain what BIE is and why we’re all doing it.
Bioengineering at Berkeley: Why combine Biology and Engineering?
Bioengineering is one of the fastest growing fields in the U.S. With an aging population, increasingly expensive healthcare, and more global epidemics such as Ebola and Zika, bioengineering is a popular way to address medical issues. It’s not just medicine: more and more industries are looking for inspiration from nature and biology to create new innovations, from biofuels and agriculture to textiles and aerospace. Although it’s a relatively new field, bioengineering attracts many bright, motivated, and generous students due to its potential for learning and improving lives (we may be a bit biased though).
Berkeley bioengineering lets student learn about both biology and engineering and offers the opportunity to apply their knowledge in 6 different concentrations: synthetic biology, biomechanics/biomaterials/cell & tissue engineering, imaging, medical devices, computational biology, and pre-med. Most concentrations have a medical focus, which is understandable given most of us went into bioengineering with that purpose. While there are opportunities for research and internships, there weren’t many opportunities to gain experience in product design and development. BioE 192 was created to fill that gap.
Amy Herr’s Vision: The Bioengineering Senior Capstone
Professor Amy Herr started the bioengineering senior capstone project course, BioE 192, in 2009 to expose bioengineers to the engineering design process by actively designing a novel medical device.
Her goal is to “give students deep exposure to realistic challenges in the dynamic and stimulating clinical and commercial medical technology environment.”
BioE 192 is open to bioengineering seniors every fall semester, running from September to December. Teams of 4 work together to address a problem posed by a client from the Bay Area, who might be a UCSF physician or a UC Berkeley researcher. The course starts with needs-finding to identify the scope of the problem and the needs associated with it. Then students proceed to generate concepts and select one to prototype. The course culminates with a presentation of their project and prototype in December, and many teams go on to compete in design competitions or start their own company.
BIE: Needs-finding in medicine and healthcare
During the capstone course, the short 4 months given to design a novel medical device isn’t very much time at all. Thus, Professor Herr obtained a grant from the National Institute of Health to start a 8-week summer program that would complement BioE 192, developing the Biodesign Immersion Experience.
“They will embed in clinical specialties and observe clinical activities, acquire the communication skills necessary to interact with clinicians, and identify unmet needs that will subsequently be addressed in biomedical design projects in BioE 192.”
In BIE, fellows who have taken BioE 192 mentor and teach proteges, who will take BioE 192 the following semester, about the design process. Additionally, the students participate extensively in the needs-finding process, visiting different locations around the Bay Area to learn how companies address needs in the medical field and observe what problems occur in hospital or clinical settings. Needs finding is a powerful process that instigates the development of solutions that solve real problems. BIE gives its participants the chance to be immersed in diverse clinical fields while identifying unmet needs that can be addressed in BioE 192.
Last Thoughts
We hope this series will be interesting for anyone who’s interested in healthcare, medical technology, and/or bioengineering. It might also be a useful resource for students interested in taking BioE 192, BIE, or similar courses offered by other institutions. We’re hoping to post at least once a week during BIE, highlighting some of the places we’ve visited and interesting facts or problems we learned about. Look for our next post about the cohort of BIE!
We’re all really into helping people from a medical perspective using science and engineering and BIE offers a nifty way to do that!
