Packaging
At Mayo Clinic, I designed a sterile, injection-moldable package for sub-retinal implants immersed in nutrient solution. The packaging allows aseptic handling, featuring iterations that refined the user interface for surgeons to handle the implant without direct contact. The design formed the basis for patent and publication work, highlighting its research and practical impact.
Wound Sealing
When doing eye surgery to implant or remove large objects, large incisions need to be made. The fluid inside of the eye leaks out of these incisions and requires a lot of fluid to be flowed back into the eye to maintain its pressure. I designed two different plugs that can be attached to the shaft of the surgical instrument to plug the incision and maintain the intraocular pressure.
Cell Growth Fixtures
In order to do several tests on a single piece of the implant scaffold material, I was asked to make a fixture that sectioned off small regions of the scaffold sheet with a watertight seal. I made two versions of this device, one for use in a standard 6 well plate which was their existing production method (as seen on the left) and one using a whole new plate that I designed to get more tests out of a single sheet ((as seen on the right). This proved difficult because there was a fine balance between enough pressure to create a waterproof seal and not too much that it destroys the fibrin scaffold.