ChemoCool

In high school, I worked as an intern on a team of high schoolers at Stanford University to develop ChemoCool, a medical device for the prevention of chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN), a painful side-effect of chemotherapy affecting millions of cancer patients each year. While there have previously been no proven effective prevention methods, recent studies show that cooling the hands and feet can mitigate CIPN. By causing the blood vessels in the hands and feet to constrict, the cold can prevent chemotherapy drugs from reaching and damaging the peripheral nerves. However, these treatments are often below-freezing and highly intolerable, resulting in high dropout rates. Furthermore, while there exist devices with regulated temperatures, they are not portable and can only be used in the hospital, making it challenging to cool for enough time to outlast the long half-life of chemotherapy drugs.

Through interviewing professors at Stanford, we found that the vasoconstriction threshold is actually much higher than the sub-zero temperatures used in the studies, occurring at around 15 degrees Celsius. Taking advantage of this, our device uses Peltier modules and an efficient heat-dissipation system to consistently cool the palms at 10 degrees Celsius, ensuring effectiveness and tolerability.

In addition to helping design the hardware component, I programmed a mobile app that connects to the device via Bluetooth, allowing for the temperature of the device to be tracked in real time.

Our team filed a provisional patent for the device, and we were invited to present it at the Stanford Cancer Institute. More recently, we were honored as Conrad Challenge Global Finalists and invited to present at NASA, an award given to only the top 5 teams out of over 300 globally.

This image was featured on the Conrad Challenge website (I'm second from the right)