On Thursday, 1 July, more than 40 students took part in the RCSI Student Innovation Challenge 2021. The event invited students at RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences to develop ideas and innovations to solve some of the biggest challenges facing global healthcare.

At the pitch event, Team RED successfully pitched their ideas to a panel of judges to become the winners of the challenge.

Team RED designed an innovative, multipronged campaign to attract BAME blood donors to help address the shortage of ethnically matched donors available for the treatment of sickle cell disease. This challenge, presented by Challenge Leader Dr Helen Fogarty, is timely in light of recent shortages announced by the Irish Blood Transfusion Blood Service this week, requiring importation of O negative blood units from the UK for the first time since the 1990s.

Now it its fourth year, the Student Innovation Challenge is the culmination of four weeks of work by the student teams, supported by training in market research, intellectual property and research commercialisation to develop innovations that have the potential solve challenges in healthcare.

Organised by the RCSI Research Summer School (RSS) and the RCSI Office of Research & Innovation as part of the programme, teams of student researchers pitched their ideas to a panel of judges, including industry experts.

Commenting on the high quality of all of the team pitches, Dr Aoife Gallagher, Head of Innovation in RCSI, said: "We were greatly impressed by the calibre and creativity of the solutions proposed to this year's challenges. Our students have demonstrated ingenuity in their approaches to solving real-world problems across key healthcare areas. The judges commended their human-centred approach, connecting with patients and clinicians to ensure patient-first solutions."

The ten teams were tasked with addressing challenges presented by RCSI researchers in five key RCSI research areas – neurological and psychiatric disorders, population health, biomaterials and regenerative medicine, surgical science and practice, and vascular biology.

The clinical challenges presented by RCSI Challenge Leaders were in the areas of:

• Endoscopic surgical skills training (Ms Leonie Heskin)
• Absence epilepsy – precision therapy titration (Dr Susan Byrne)
• COVID-19 and mental health (Dr Mary Clarke)
• Sickle cell disease and ethnically matched donor sourcing (Dr Helen Fogarty)
• Ureteric stent design (Mr Niall Davis)

The RCSI RSS provides undergraduate students with a unique opportunity to work on a research project under the supervision of an RCSI Principal Investigator, acquiring key research skills and experience across a broad spectrum of disciplines.

Led by Dr Aoife Gallagher and Dr Shona Pfeiffer, the Student Innovation Challenge is delivered within the RSS, which sees students working with challenge leaders on real clinical problems to become innovators, communicators and skilled clinical practitioners.