Rice University Heartbeat HERoes Take Top Engineering Prize for Collaboration With The Texas Heart Institute

The Heartbeat HERoes recently won the 2024 Woods-Lezar Innovation Award at Rice University’s annual Huff Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen’s (OEDK) Engineering Design Showcase. The students’ mentorship team included several engineers and clinicians from The Texas Heart Institute’s Electrophysiology Clinical Research and Innovations group.

The all-woman engineering team created a prototype catheter designed to treat irregular heartbeats originating from the ventricles of the heart, known as premature ventricular contractions (PVCs). Their design streamlines existing approaches to alcohol ablation, which currently requires the use of three separate catheters to target and treat PVCs.