Bioengineering

Bioengineering’s Team Cobra strikes down its competition

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

Most graduating seniors are already thinking about starting a career or attending graduate school, but a group of five seniors from Rice’s bioengineering program are taking on an additional challenge after graduation — they’re preparing for several national competitions to present a yearlong research and design project for a device that could revolutionize long-term spaceflight and may aid in the fight against osteoporosis here on Earth.

The group, known as “Team Cobra,” has already won several awards in Texas competitions. A week after graduation, the members will travel to Florida for their first national competition, and they hope to compete in October in the granddaddy of all biomedical student research competitions, the Biomedical Engineering Society’s (BMES) annual IDEA Competition, sponsored by the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance.

“From the very beginning, this team has not only come through with big ideas, but it’s also shown an incredible work ethic,” said Michael Liebschner, assistant professor in bioengineering at Rice and the faculty adviser for the group. “They’ve left nothing undone, and they’ve approached every part of this project with a level of enthusiasm that I’ve never seen before.

“It was most exciting to work with them because they thought outside the box, sought advice from others, initiated collaborations with faculty at other universities and even integrated friends and family. The team used a breadth of resources to advance with enormous speed and to ultimately succeed in their project.”

Team Cobra began winning awards in its first competition last fall with a prototype device called the “Spine and Trochanter External Vibration Effecter” (STEVE). The device is designed to counter both muscle atrophy and bone loss during long-term spaceflights. The initial design was funded with a $1,250 grant from the Texas Space Grant Consortium (TSGC). STEVE brought home three top prizes — best poster, best model and best photo essay — at the November 2004 TSGC Design Challenge Showcase in League City, and Team Cobra more than doubled their count for top honors in the TSGC’s spring competition in April, bringing home awards for best team Web site, best photo essay, best documentary short, best field experience brochure, best K-12 outreach, best model and best team patch. Team Cobra also won the first TSGC Design Challenge Legends Award in its four-year history, given to teams that impressed the judges the most with their drive for success, enthusiasm for space science and community engagement.

“Together with a second team from Rice bioengineering — The Space Owls — Rice undergraduate students claimed all nine monetary awards at the TSGC Design Challenge Showcase last month in competing against 15 participating teams from seven universities,” Liebschner said.

One reason they have been so successful is STEVE’s innovative design and the fact that it addresses one of the most persistent obstacles NASA faces as it prepares to return to the moon and explore Mars. From prior research, it is clear that astronauts lose bone mass and muscle mass during long-term spaceflights. While current countermeasures against muscle loss in microgravity are fairly successful, the bone mass lost in the spine, hips and thigh bone is a critical concern because no technology has been shown to prevent bone loss. Also of concern is the lack of evidence that astronauts will regain the same bone quality after returning to Earth.

Based on prior research, which established that high-frequency, low-amplitude vibration of bone combats bone-density loss from lack of normal body stress on bones, the students came up with a system of small motors that could be strapped to an astronaut’s body to deliver vibrations throughout all the joints in the body. The system uses a combination of strategic loading and vibration techniques to stimulate the muscles and bones in key physiological sites. Everything is run by a central control system that coordinates the effects of the motors.

To date, the team has won more than $1,400 just in prizes, and they’ve already filed a provisional patent for this technology with Rice’s Office of Technology Transfer.

Team member and Lovett College senior Austin Elam said STEVE has a great deal of potential for use as a treatment for osteoporosis. The belt portion of the device may reduce bone loss in elderly individuals with this metabolic bone disease. Best of all, it’s easy to use, inexpensive and requires only 15 minutes of use each day. This month, Team Cobra takes STEVE on the road to Cocoa Beach, Fla., where they’ll be judged by representatives from NASA and the space industry at the annual meeting of the Lunar and Planetary Institute’s Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts Academic Linkage Forum. The event runs May 22-25. In October, Team Cobra will compete at the BMES-IDEA competition in Baltimore.

“This project has been a great experience for us all, but we know we’re only going to get to do this for a little while longer,” Elam said. “After graduation, the members of Team Cobra will take their own paths. Some of us are going to graduate school, some to medical school and some to law school.”

Team members include Austin Elam, Zeyad Metwalli and Thomas Rooney, all of Lovett College, Christopher Gibson of Martel College and Roland Robb of Baker College.

For more information, visit the Team Cobra Web site, <www.riceteamcobra.com>.