Over the past year, as part of my Master's in Medical Product Engineering (MS-MPE) in Bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh, my team and I set out to address one of the most overlooked inefficiencies in pediatric medicine: tympanostomy, or ear tube placement, is the most common anesthetized procedure in children — roughly 1 million cases per year in the US — yet it still requires general anesthesia, an operating room, and a hospital visit averaging $7,500 per case, all for a 4-minute procedure.
Working with our clinical mentor Dr. Noel Jabbour, a pediatric otolaryngologist at UPMC Children's Hospital, we developed MicroTymp — a single-use ear tube device featuring a dissolvable introducer tip and a self-expanding tube that allows for one-step, in-office placement using standard alligator forceps, with no general anesthesia required. The device is designed to feel like a natural extension of the tools surgeons already use, addressing a key adoption failure of existing competitor systems.
My contributions spanned device design and clinical validation. On the design side, I led early-stage tip prototyping, experimenting with dissolvable material analogs to characterize dissolution behavior and inform our formulation direction. Benchtop testing confirmed that our prototype materials dissolve within the target clinical time range and that the tube reliably expands and seats itself within a simulated membrane. On the commercial side, I led customer discovery through the NSF I-Corps program, conducting interviews with pediatric ENT surgeons across UPMC and WVU Medicine to validate our value proposition and surface real-world adoption barriers.
To date, the team has filed a provisional patent through the Pitt Innovation Institute, secured $5,000 in non-dilutive funding through the Pitt Wells HealthTech Challenge, and won 2nd place in the University of Pittsburgh Big Idea Competition. We are pursuing a 510(k) regulatory pathway using the Armstrong tube as a predicate device, with cadaveric feasibility testing planned in partnership with Dr. Jabbour