Rice University seniors have built a device to to ensure necessary fat contained in mothers’ milk is reaching premature babies who have to be fed by tube. From left: Denizen Kocak, Nathan Liu, Alexa Juarez, Jane Jarjour and Mika Tabata. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)
(HOUSTON) – Babies born more than five or six weeks early can’t feed from a bottle or breast because they’re unable to coordinate sucking, breathing and swallowing. The solution has been to tube-feed them milk, but that presents problems. Up to 50 percent of the fat in mother’s milk clings to the tubing, never making it into the baby’s body. Also lost are essential nutrients, including calcium, phosphorus and magnesium, that bind to the fat.
So a group of Rice University students set out to find a new way to make sure premature infants get the nutrients they need.
“Fat is essential for preemies, but it’s always been a problem getting it to them,” said Mika Tabata, a senior at Rice. “Our task was to figure out a way to increase the amount of fat they receive, which has been difficult.”
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The team was comprised of senior bioengineering students Tabata, Alexa Juarez, Denizen Kocak and Nathan Liu, as well as Jane Jarjour, a senior majoring in biochemistry and cell biology.
“We started out just using a stir-bar to mix the fat into the milk,” Liu said. “That showed a little improvement but not enough. We tried a sort of blender arrangement, but that stirred the milk too much. It was like churning butter.”
The breakthrough came when the team realized breast milk had to be mixed both in the feeding bag and the tubing. They devised a motorized panel programmed to flip the plastic sack holding the milk every three minutes, the optimal rate for mixing.
After repeated fine-tunings, the team was able to assure that 95 percent of the fat in the milk could reach the child — an increase of up to 45 percent.
“We couldn’t believe it. After hours of hard work and going over the design, we finally hit the sweet spot,” Liu said.
They call this device Nutriflow, and it won the Best Health-Related Engineering Design Award at the George R. Brown School of Engineering Design Showcase and Poster Competition on April 17.
The research was done in collaboration with Steven Abrams, who researches the absorption and metabolism of dietary minerals in infants and children at Baylor College of Medicine, and Keli Hawthorne, a senior registered dietitian at Texas Children’s Hospital and BCM.
The project was funded through Beyond Traditional Borders and made possible by a grant to Rice University from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute through the Undergraduate Science Education Program.
Watch a video about the project:
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Rice University Students Develop Better Way to Feed Preemies [WATCH] was originally published on news92fm.com
