IMED students work to solve maternal mortality through 51 Labs challenge
block Heading link
Maternal mortality refers to deaths due to pregnancy complications or childbirth. 1,205 women died of maternal causes in the U.S. in 2021, and the maternal mortality rate for the same year was 32.9 deaths per 100,000 live births.
Recently, two fourth-year medical students in the University of Illinois Chicago Innovation in Medicine (IMED) program entered MATTER’s 51 Labs challenge. The technology they are working on began in part as a project in a biomedical engineering department course. MATTER is a global healthcare startup incubator based at the Merchandise Mart in Chicago.
After they were chosen to become part of the challenge, medical students Katie Buzenius and Sohil Amin created a device that uses ultraviolet (UV) light to cleanse blood to reduce the bacterial load during postpartum hemorrhage for it to be re-transfused into the body. UV light is strong enough to kill DNA, but red blood cells do not contain DNA, and UV light can kill bacteria to treat and use blood during autologous transfusions.
Buzenius and Amin took these techniques from previous work that came to Innovation in Medicine students through BME 250, Clinical Problems in Biomedical Engineering, and applied the UV light aspect to it. This project was the creation of a novel obstetrics device for autotransfusions.
As part of this challenge, they created a company named BAKS Medical, which combines both Buzenius and Amin’s initials. Their company aims to provide an innovative medical device that effectively addresses postpartum hemorrhage in low-resource settings, underscoring their commitment to advancing women’s health worldwide.
“Bacterial load is high during postpartum hemorrhage as the blood lost from a vaginal birth is not sterile, being exposed to a bacterium from that environment,” Amin said. “Current autologous transfusion solutions require a sterile environment. Our solution attempts to be able to use non-sterile blood to re-transfuse back into patients, so there is vastly more flexibility in the situations autologous transfusion can be used, including postpartum hemorrhage.”
Postpartum hemorrhage causes approximately 11% of maternal deaths in the U.S. According to the World Health Organization, postpartum hemorrhage is the leading cause of maternal mortality worldwide. Each year, about 14 million women experience postpartum hemorrhage, resulting in about 70,000 maternal deaths globally.
“Having access to readily accessible autologous transfusion blood, especially in the face of the current blood shortage crisis in the U.S., is something that we think could make a huge difference in solving a problem that’s causing a lot of unnecessary death both in the US and abroad,” Amin said. “That’s ultimately why we both joined medical school, why we’re both doing this device and company.”
A previous medical school project that focused on sterilizing surgical tools with UV light inspired their current technology.
Throughout this process, they also completed validation studies and presented them to the Society for the Advancement of Blood Management in Nashville, Tennessee.
Amin and Buzenius are working with UIC Department of Pathology Assistant Professor Omar Perez as their Principal Investigator. They have hired an industrial designer and will eventually hire a mechanical engineer with further funding.
Within this project, the two hope to eventually combine UV light with a modern autotransfusion machine.
“We want to use our combined machine to target rural medicine,” Buzenius said. “More specifically, we would target midwives, emergency services, OBGYNs, and rural areas and provide them with an alternative source of blood since we’ve got a growing rate of maternal mortality in rural areas and the largest blood shortage in the U.S. in the past 20 years.”
In addition, experience with her company, Midwest Blood, inspired Buzenius to apply to the challenge.
“The idea of working with postpartum hemorrhage was based on an initial case that I had back in 2008 when we lost a patient due to postpartum hemorrhage,” she said. “I had been thinking about this case for years and years, and it was one of the reasons that pushed me to go to medical school.”
Prior to entering medical school, Buzenius worked and still works as a co-founder, president, and majority shareholder of Midwest Blood, which provides support services for autologous blood products. She noted that it’s the largest auto transfusion company in the Chicagoland area. Buzenius is also the primary inventor and project lead.
Amin received his bachelor’s degree in bioengineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he also had experience creating a BiPAP machine that was shipped to Sierra Leone.
The two presented their project to venture capitalists to gain more funding in May.
The Laerdel Million Lives Fund sponsors the MATTER 51 Labs challenge.