Triantis ’17 Wins Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for Innovation

Almost as soon as Sophia Triantis ’17 started at Johns Hopkins University, she joined the biomedical engineering department’s Undergraduate Design Team Program, which challenges students to develop innovative health care solutions.

On April 23, Triantis and her teammates received a strong vote of confidence in their ideas when they won a Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for their invention, a breast biopsy device designed for use in lower-resource countries. Lemelson prizes are awarded annually to promising young inventors across the country.

Triantis gravitated toward the breast cancer screening group at Johns Hopkins because of the disease’s global health implications. Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women and the second most common cancer overall, according to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Team members included Johns Hopkins undergraduate students Laura Hinson, Madeline Lee, and Valerie Zawicki.

“The biggest draw for any of us on the team is that, if we were to have a breast cancer diagnosis, it would be found early enough that it could be treated, and we would have access to the resources that are at most U.S. hospitals,” Triantis said. “In low-resource settings, where people will go undiagnosed until their cancer is Stage 4, it’s almost impossible to treat.”

This sobering fact inspired the team’s design goals and its name, Ithemba, which means “hope” in Zulu. “We really are striving to give all women hope, no matter their location,” Triantis said.

Triantis began by doing “a little bit of everything” on the team: prototyping, tweaking, and testing the device. She has since gravitated to the business side of things, applying for different pitch competitions and helping arrange funding through grants and programs. Last year, Ithemba won second place in the Social Enterprise category of Johns Hopkins’s Business Plan Competition.

A grant provided a trip last summer to South Africa, where Ithemba spent six weeks at the Hlokomela Clinic. There, team members learned more about the practicality of their device in a setting without access to reliable breast cancer diagnostic tools.

“It was really important to us that our design reflect the locations where we are aiming to implement it. We can’t really sit in Johns Hopkins University and design something that will fit the needs of those who will be using it without understanding and having conversations with those who would be the primary ones using this device,” Triantis said.

From that trip, Ithemba concluded that its prototype needed to be not only safe and reliable but also reusable. Similar devices on the market are either intended for one-time use, making them more expensive, or carry a high risk of internal contamination, which make them more dangerous to reuse. Ithemba’s innovation mean diagnostics could cost $5-10 per patient instead of $50-200.

Triantis said her love of engineering began while on the Science Olympiad team at NCS: “I had a lot of fun learning about different areas of engineering and then connecting all of the dots between what we had learned in the classroom and applying that to real design challenges. …That is definitely something that has inspired my excitement about problem-solving, and a lot of that knowledge has carried over to this design project.”

NCS also instilled in her a passion for global change, something she credits to her community service experience, including as a member of student government’s Service Board.

Ithemba will use the Lemelson prize money to help fund its utility patent application and legal fees. It hopes to soon begin clinical trials with partner clinics that will test the device’s efficacy.