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If the 20th century was the age of mapping and controlling the external world, the 21st century is the biomedical age of mapping and controlling the biological internal world. The biomedical age is bringing new technological breakthroughs for sensing and controlling human biomolecules, cells, tissues, and organs, which underpin new frontiers in the biomedical discovery, data, biomanufacturing, and translational sciences. This article reviews what we believe will be the next wave of biomedical engineering (BME) education in support of the biomedical age, what we have termed BME 2.0. BME 2.0 was announced on October 12 2017 at BMES 49 (https://www.bme.jhu.edu/news-events/news/miller-opens-2017-bmes-annual-meeting-with-vision-for-new-bme-era/). We present several principles upon which we believe the BME 2.0 curriculum should be constructed, and from these principles, we describe what view as the foundations that form the next generations of curricula in support of the BME enterprise. The core principles of BME 2.0 education are (a) educate students bilingually, from day 1, in the languages of modern molecular biology and the analytical modeling of complex biological systems; (b) prepare every student to be a biomedical data scientist; (c) build a unique BME community for discovery and innovation via a vertically integrated and convergent learning environment spanning the university and hospital systems; (d) champion an educational culture of inclusive excellence; and (e) codify in the curriculum ongoing discoveries at the frontiers of the discipline, thus ensuring BME 2.0 as a launchpad for training the future leaders of the biotechnology marketplaces. We envision that the BME 2.0 education is the path for providing every student with the training to lead in this new era of engineering the future of medicine in the 21st century.
ABSTRACT
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.34133/bmef.0001.].
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[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1017/cts.2021.1.].
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The success rate for translation of newly engineered medical technologies into clinical practice is low. Traversing the "translational valleys of death" requires a high level of knowledge of the complex landscape of technical, ethical, regulatory, and commercialization challenges along a multi-agency path of approvals. The Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute developed a program targeted at increasing that success rate through comprehensive training, education, and resourcing. The Medical Technology Advance Program (MTAP) provides technical, educational, and consultative assistance to investigators that leverages partnerships with experts in the health products industry to speed progress toward clinical implementation. The training, resourcing, and guidance are integrated through the entire journey of medical technology translation. Investigators are supported through a set of courses that cover bioethics, ethical engineering, preclinical and clinical study design, regulatory submissions, entrepreneurship, and commercialization. In addition to the integrated technical and educational resources, program experts provide direct consultation for planning each phase along the life cycle of translation. Since 2008, nearly 200 investigators have gained assistance from MTAP resulting in over 100 publications and patents. This support via medicine-engineering-industry partnership provides a unique and novel opportunity to expedite new medical technologies into clinical and product implementation.
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An important goal of teaching ethics to engineering students is to enhance their ability to make well-reasoned ethical decisions in their engineering practice: a goal in line with the stated ethical codes of professional engineering organizations. While engineering educators have explored a wide range of methodologies for teaching ethics, a satisfying model for developing ethical reasoning skills has not been adopted broadly. In this paper we argue that a principlist-based approach to ethical reasoning is uniquely suited to engineering ethics education. Reflexive Principlism is an approach to ethical decision-making that focuses on internalizing a reflective and iterative process of specification, balancing, and justification of four core ethical principles in the context of specific cases. In engineering, that approach provides structure to ethical reasoning while allowing the flexibility for adaptation to varying contexts through specification. Reflexive Principlism integrates well with the prevalent and familiar methodologies of reasoning within the engineering disciplines as well as with the goals of engineering ethics education.
Subject(s)
Decision Making/ethics , Engineering/ethics , Ethical Theory , Moral Development , Principle-Based Ethics , Thinking , Codes of Ethics , Ethical Analysis , Ethics, Research , HumansABSTRACT
The rate of angiogenesis and cellular infiltration into degradable biomaterials determines scaffold persistence in vivo. The ability to tune the degradation properties of naturally derived biomaterials has been a popular goal in tissue engineering, yet has often depended on chemical crosslinking. Small intestinal submucosa (SIS) is a naturally derived, collagen-based, bioactive scaffold that has broad clinical success in many therapeutic applications. Two methods for producing multilayer, non-crosslinked SIS constructs were compared in vitro and in vivo. Traditional and cryo SEM, mercury intrusion porosimetry, and a novel enzymatic degradation assay determined that lyophilization produced an open, porous scaffold, in contrast to the collapsed, denser structure of SIS constructs produced using a vacuum press process. The angiogenic responses to lyophilized and vacuum-pressed SIS constructs were evaluated in vivo using a subcutaneous implant assay in mice. Explanted samples were compared after 7 and 21 days using fluorescence microangiography and light microscopy. Capacity of the implant neovasculature was also determined. These experiments revealed that the lyophilized SIS was infiltrated and vascularized more rapidly than the vacuum pressed. These data demonstrate the tunable incorporation of a non-crosslinked ECM-based biomaterial, which may have implications for the persistence of this degradable scaffold in tissue engineering.
