2024 Contest Now Accepting Entries!

Submit your best new product ideas for a chance at $25,000, other great prizes, and global recognition. If you already are registered, log in to access the entry form. Otherwise, click here to get started.

Help build a better tomorrow

Since Tech Briefs magazine launched the Create the Future Design contest in 2002 to recognize and reward engineering innovation, over 15,000 design ideas have been submitted by engineers, students, and entrepreneurs across six continents. You can also join the innovators who dared to dream big and build a better tomorrow by entering this year’s contest.

Read About Past Winners’ Success Stories

Over the past 20 years, many innovators have used the recognition afforded by the contest to advance the development and marketing of their technologies. We highlight some success stories of past winners who have brought their inventions to the marketplace.

Click here to read more

A ‘Create the Future’ Winner Featured on ‘Here’s an Idea’

Spinal cord injury affects 17,000 Americans and 700,000 people worldwide each year. A research team at NeuroPair, Inc. won the Grand Prize in the 2023 Create the Future Design Contest for a revolutionary approach to spinal cord repair. In this Here’s an Idea podcast episode, Dr. Johannes Dapprich, NeuroPair’s CEO and founder, discusses their groundbreaking approach that addresses a critical need in the medical field, offering a fast and minimally invasive solution to a long-standing problem.

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Thank you from our Sponsors

“At COMSOL, we are very excited to recognize innovators and their important work this year. We are grateful for the opportunity to support the Create the Future Design Contest, which is an excellent platform for designers to showcase their ideas and products in front of a worldwide audience. Best of luck to all participants!”

— Bernt Nilsson, Senior Vice President of Marketing, COMSOL, Inc.

“From our beginnings, Mouser has supported engineers, innovators and students. We are proud of our longstanding support for the Create the Future Design Contest and the many innovations it has inspired.”

— Kevin Hess, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Mouser Electronics

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XVIVO Organ Perfusion System

Votes: 11
Views: 13299
Medical

In the United States, only 15% of available donor lungs are transplanted into critical recipients due to the associated damage to the organs from the traumatic death event.

The XVIVO Perfusion System (XPS) is a mobile intensive care unit that can repair damaged organs ex vivo (out of the donor's body) for successful transplantation into a waiting recipient. The XPS includes a centrifugal cardiac bypass pump, fluid heater/cooler unit, in-line fiber optic gas analyzer (to determine continuous pH, pCO2 and pO2) and an ICU ventilator. It safely perfuses a blood substitute throughout the entire organ in a carefully controlled environment, which allows the damaged organ to effectively repair itself over time. In a North American clinical trial (published in April, 2011 in the New England Journal of Medicine), it was shown that 60% of available donor lungs can actually be used safely for transplant using our technique, an increase of 45% over current US numbers!

We have just started a US clinical trial in June, 2011, in persuit of FDA approval for the XPS device and technique to recondition human lungs for transplant. In the near future, we plan to extend our technique to additional donor organs, including liver, heart and kidney. By creating a safe, isolated environment for organ perfusion, it is very possible to imagine using the XPS device to perfuse diseased organs (cancer, Cystic Fibrosis, etc.) treating them with high-dose chemotherapy, gene therapy and eventually stem cells. In such an isolated envionment, there would be no harmful side effects to the patient from these aggressive therapies.

Our XPS device was designed to be manufactured using best-of-class, off-the-shelf equipment in an effort to bring the device to market as quickly and inexpensively as possible. Under this rapid design model, the XPS was designed, prototyped, manufactured and validated for clinical trials in approximately one year. The cost for the XPS is similar to purchasing the individual components separately from a number of different manufacturers, but the advantage is that all required equipment fits and works together inside one device.

Transplant hospitals will purchase the XPS for use in their operating rooms. The organ will be transported to the hospital using the current cost-effective cold storage transport methods. Once it arrives to the hospital, the transplant team will connect the organ to the XPS and gradually warm it up to body temperature, allowing the organ to operate at full metabolism and repair itself as if it were still in a body. An additional advantage of this procedure is that it dramatically increases the time the organ remains viable from 6 hours (cold transport only) to more than 20 hours (combined cold, XPS warm and more cold), allowing more time to find better-matched recipients and greatly increasing successful outcomes.

With the XPS machine and the XVIVO technique, we believe that the US waiting list will decrease from the currently 110,000 waiting patients to a more manageable waiting list, eventually providing organs to all waiting recipients.

  • Awards

  • 2011 Medical Category Winner

Voting

Voting is closed!

  • ABOUT THE ENTRANT

  • Name:
    Chris Jaynes
  • Type of entry:
    team
    Team members:
    Chris Jaynes
    Tom Taccini
    Tim Klug
  • Profession:
    Business Owner/Manager
  • Number of times previously entering contest:
    1
  • Chris's favorite design and analysis tools:
    SolidWorks, Photoshop
  • For managing CAD data Chris's company uses:
    SolidWorks PDMWorks
  • Chris's hobbies and activities:
    Superhero stuff (coaching my kids' sports teams)
  • Chris belongs to these online communities:
    LinkedIn
  • Chris is inspired by:
    Creating unique solutions to healthcare problems and disrupting the status quo when necessary to save lives.
  • Software used for this entry:
    SolidWorks
  • Patent status:
    pending