Fort Worth Medical Student Gets Grant For Medical Device Prototype

FORT WORTH– There’s an old saying in business that goes, “there is no time like the present to get your idea off the ground,” and that’s exactly what Coltin Gerhart did recently.

Gerhart, a second-year medical student at TCU and UNTHSC School of Medicine, received a $1,500 grant from the TCU Neeley School of Business Create Opportunity powered by Shaddock Seed Fund, a part of their Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

“It’s cool because I had been sitting on this idea for a year and a half before I got accepted into medical school,” Gerhart said.

The Create fund launched during the 2019-2020 academic year at TCU and has already funded 53 ideas from all eight schools and colleges across the TCU Campus. Participants could pitch their idea through a video submission explaining their idea and its usefulness in any field for a chance to receive up to $25,000 in funding.

Two days before the submission deadline back in March, Gerhart decided to clean up his email inbox where he stumbled upon the Create fund email.

“I was eating dinner while I was scrolling through my email and I looked at the date and it said I only had 36 hours left to submit,” Gerhart said. “I was sitting there thinking what am I going to do.”

Gerhart had a Clinical Skills session coming up the following day and knew that he wouldn’t get back home until late that night. Instead of waiting until the last minute, before class began the next morning, he pulled out his smartphone and recorded a video pitch of his idea.

“I had it in this little black folder I had been carrying around,” Gerhart said. “I just took a chance and recorded myself talking about the idea and where I thought it could fit and what problems I thought it would solve.”

That spontaneous video submission is exactly what the Create fund is about. The flyer that was emailed to students across the TCU campus urged students, “Don’t overthink it, just do it.”

The video pitch needed to be 5-7 minutes long, present a problem and a solution, identify the competition and size of the market, explain how it differs from what’s already available and give a ballpark figure of how much it may cost to make the idea a reality.

The Create fund is designed to give seed money to grow the selected ideas into the next successful venture without any equity or strings attached.

Gerhart wasn’t sure his idea would make the cut, but two weeks later he received an email from TCU Neeley congratulating him for having his idea selected.

“I was excited,” Gerhart said. “They laid out all the instructions of what steps to take next and that I had been awarded $1,500 to use toward looking into the intellectual property, exploring different mechanism for the design and to make a working prototype.”

However, this was only the beginning of this journey for Gerhart. He was advised to keep his idea for the medical device under wraps until the prototype was completed and patented.

He decided to reach out to Michael Bernas, director of Scholarly Pursuit and Thesis at TCU and UNTHSC School of Medicine.

“What’s interesting is that right before this I had talked to (Professor) Bernas to see if he knew any biomedical engineers in the community I could talk to and get to know,” Gerhart said. “I had already kind of planted the seed about exploring this idea before it had been selected so my next conversation with him just kind of flowed naturally.”

Bernas put Gerhart in touch with Robert Benkowski, MBA, an assistant professor at the medical school and the CEO of DesignPlex Biomedical.

Benkowski’s Fort Worth-based company specializes in the design and manufacture of medical devices.

“I knew Mr. Benkowski was the right person to connect him with because he is one of our mentors who is very experienced in private biomedical research,” Bernas said. “We are fortunate to have wonderful faculty members who can support students with ideas like Coltin’s which is outside of his traditional medical education.”

The connection led to Coltin visiting Benkowski at his company where he was able to see the facility, meet the team and come up with a few ideas for creating a prototype.

“I wanted something that could adapt to the way providers already use devices similar to this one,” Gerhart said. “Talking to the DesignPlex team was extremely enlightening; they taught me a lot about how to turn rotational motion into translational motion. Afterwards, I basically spent the entire time researching what that even meant. But I’ve been able to use that guidance and start to draw up prototypes and look for flaws and keep building.”

Gerhart has been spending his spare time working on the project with the help of one of his classmates and continuing to receive guidance from Bernas.

“Ultimately, we are here to support the whole student from medical education to help with projects like this which are not in the curriculum,” Bernas said. “We strive to encourage curiosity, questioning, and lifelong learning skills to all students to help develop the next generation of physicians.”

Being able to make these kinds of connections and have the support of the faculty in pursuing these kinds of endeavors is a huge benefit of attending the school of medicine, Gerhart added.

“I had this idea for a year and a half and I didn’t have anybody to talk to about it or ask questions about it,” Gerhart said. “Having the ability to reach out to anybody and everybody and they make you feel comfortable, I think that’s definitely a strong point of our school.”