Benjamin Terry
Brigham Young University, UT·Biomedical Engineering
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is long-term inflammation of the gut that affects millions of adults. Diagnosing, monitoring and treating it often depends on invasive procedures.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
inflammatory bowel disease
tethered capsule
capsule endoscopy
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Design and fabricate a tethered capsule optimized for prolonged retention in the gastrointestinal tract, using a biocompatible, degradable tether and tethered odometry to track position.
- Design and evaluate a cheek anchoring and release system that holds the capsule's tether in place and lets it go when needed.
- Test whether the capsule system, with auto-halting navigation, can stay within 2 cm of a target site for 12 hours in a synthetic model of the gut.
More about the research
Drugs usually travel through the whole body instead of acting only where the gut is inflamed. A device that could stay at one spot in the digestive tract could watch the disease there and deliver medicine directly to it.
Why it matters
For people with IBD, a capsule that stays at an inflamed site could allow continuous local monitoring and targeted drug delivery. That could make treatment more effective and cause fewer whole-body side effects than current approaches. It might also lower healthcare costs. The platform could later support more personalized treatment of other chronic GI disorders.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Mohammad Azad
North Carolina A & T State University, NC·Biomedical Engineering
Model how host, gut microbe and environmental factors such as diet and smoking interact in inflammatory bowel disease, using data science on the IBD Multi-omics Database to find key biomarkers.
Alex Abramson
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Develop a molecularly imprinted polymer sensor, a plastic film that captures cortisol, that resists stomach acid and abrasion, using covalent anchoring chemistry for rapid electrochemical regeneration.
Gary Wu
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Microbiology & Immunology
Provide analytic services to measure genomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics in both microbes and their mammalian hosts, including FACS, a method that sorts cells by fluorescent labels, and next-generation sequencing.
The school
Brigham Young University: 4 labs on PI Pages, $158M a year on research, 114 research doctorates a year.
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