From lab to patent: Undergrad creates smart syringe for bioprinting

Read the full story by David Nutt in the Cornell Chronicle.

Sometimes a researcher goes into the lab and comes out with a discovery. Sometimes that discovery is issued a patent. Very rarely does the process also involve an undergraduate, a potential breakthrough for biomedical printing and cell therapy, and a little help from Bill Nye ’77 the Science Guy.

As an ambitious sophomore, Jared Matthews ’21 was looking for a research project and he approached Lawrence Bonassar, the Daljit S. and Elaine Sarkaria Professor in Biomedical Engineering and in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in Cornell Engineering. Together they created a smart sensor that attaches to the tip of a syringe to measure, in real time, the concentration and viability of the cells that pass through it – a device that would enable surgeons and biomanufacturers to produce higher quality implants of living tissue, even organs.

“A lot of inventions come out of this university,” Bonassar said. “Not a lot of them involve undergraduates, and not a lot of them happened during COVID. Most of our peers didn’t even have undergraduates on campus in fall 2020. And here we have an undergraduate not only on campus, but working in a lab and inventing and patenting something that could be really impactful.”