CERVICAL CANCER SCREENING DEVICE WINS ANNUAL BENCH TO BEDSIDE COMPETITION

April 11, 2024

The C-Blu team’s device provides greater visual contrast to potentially cancerous lesions, enabling improved accuracy for clinicians during the screening process.

Despite a crowded field of over 30 other entries, the C-Blu team rose to the top to be named the Grand Prize Winner at the 14th Annual Bench to Bedside Competition on Monday night at the Utah State Capitol Building.

Comprised of five University of Utah students, C-Blu developed a blue-light colposcope which increases the sensitivity of images generated during cervical cancer screenings. To decrease high false negative rates, the C-Blu colposcope takes advances of the unique fluorescent properties of cancerous cells to make pre-cancerous lesions easier for clinicians to identify.

Presented by the Center for Medical Innovation at the University of Utah Health, the Bench to Bedside program offers college students across Utah an opportunity to solve unmet clinical problems and build next-generation medical devices and innovative healthcare technologies. Over the course of the school year (Aug-April) students form interdisciplinary teams, meet with clinicians and industry professionals, build prototypes, and develop research-based marketing and regulatory strategies. The culmination of each team’s hard work is displayed each April at the annual Bench to Bedside Competition Night.

With over 500 competitors, judges, family, friends, and spectators in attendance at this year’s Competition Night event, C-Blu and all of this year’s 32 competing teams at at the Capitol Building were able to showcase their projects to a wide range of audiences.

“Our country and our world are facing one of the biggest challenges we have every seen – more people are entering healthcare systems than ever before. The Baby Boomer generation is aging, and it’s going to take tremendous work to take care of everyone,” explained Mark Paul, Executive Director of the Center for Medical Innovation, during the awards ceremony on Monday evening. “The only way we can rise the challenge is through innovation – and it’s up to you, the next generation to help us make that possible.”

While all participating teams in Bench to Bedside have access to the Center for Medical Innovation’s Prototyping & Design Lab throughout the competition, the winning teams will have a bit more help going forward – over $80,000 in milestone funding to further develop their project. Sponsored by Zions Bank and the University of Utah Health, since the Bench to Bedside program began in 2012, over $1.4 million has been awarded to winning teams.

To learn more about the Bench to Bedside program and the Center for Medical Innovation, please visit cmi.uofuhealth.org