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- All Subjects: Biomedical
- Creators: Harrington Bioengineering Program
- Creators: Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
- Creators: Fauer, Chase Alexander
- Member of: Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Two animal trials were performed involving a rat and two pigs in order to prove the efficacy of VitreOx™ in addition to being compared with competitor, Covidien Clearify. A laparoscopy was performed on each animal, and the length of time that the endoscope took to fog was measured post product application. The results of the optimized animal clinical trials involving two Yucatan pigs showed that the scope treated with Covidien’s Clearify began fogging within 8 minutes and continued to do so for the remained of the surgery, as opposed to the scope with VitreOx™ which remained fog free for the full 90-minute procedure. The results proved the efficacy of our product.
The second part of the thesis aimed to optimize HemoClear™, the blood evacuating TFFD™. This was done by testing a higher concentration of 6 mg/mL fibrinogen as compared to previous work. After conducting an experiment designed to mimic closed-body cavity surgery it was determined that the HemoClear™ eliminated fog 67% of the time and evacuated blood with a success of 83%. Future work aims to continue testing at this concentration with variances in mixing and application technique.
The project was aimed towards middle school and high school students, as this is the estimated level where they learn biology and chemistry—key subject material in biomedical engineering. The high school students were given presentations and activities related to biomedical engineering. Additionally, within classrooms, posters were presented to middle school students. The content of the posters were students of the biomedical engineering program at ASU, coming from different ethnic backgrounds to try and evoke within the middle school students a sense of their own identity as a biomedical engineer. To evaluate the impact these materials had on the students, a survey was distributed before the students’ exposure to the materials and after that assesses the students’ understanding of engineering at two different time points. A statistical analysis was conducted with Microsoft Excel to assess the influence of the activity and/or presentation on the students’ understanding of engineering.
Polymer drug delivery system offers a key to a glaring issue in modern administration routes of drugs and biologics. Poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) can be used to encapsulate drugs and biologics and deliver them into the patient, which allows high local concentration (compared to current treatment methods), protection of the cargo from the bodily environment, and reduction in systemic side effects. This experiment used a single emulsion technique to encapsulate L-tyrosine in PLGA microparticles and UV spectrophotometry to analyze the drug release over a period of one week. The release assay found that for the tested samples, the released amount is distinct initially, but is about the same after 4 days, and they generally follow the same normalized percent released pattern. The experiment could continue with testing more samples, test the same samples for a longer duration, and look into higher w/w concentrations such as 20% or 50%.