Muthu Vellayappan has won the 'Audience Choice award' at the FameLab competition which was organized by British Council Australia.
Muthu, who is a postgraduate student at Monash University in Melbourne, was the only Indian-Australian to make it to the finals.
He was chosen for his work on heart disease and treatment using heart ''patches".
The overall winner of FameLab Australia was Vanessa Pirotta. She now goes on to represent Australia at the FameLab finals in the UK.
FameLab is run annually in Australia and in over 30 countries worldwide and aims to 'inspire, motivate and develop young scientists and engineers to actively engage with the public and stakeholders'.
Muthu's presentation was titled 'Groovy Patches'. Several people on twitter commented about Muthu's presentation on 'fixing a broken heart',
SBS Hindi spoke to Muthu Vellayappan after his win. He began by thanking all those who voted for him and told us that he felt "humbled, great and excited".
Mr Vellayappan also mentioned that for those youngsters and children who are considering a career in science, they should go for their passion, "If you do what you like, you will definitely shine."
3D printing
"At present there are problems with the current treatments for treating patients with heart attack. I am currently working on 3D Printing, what we are doing here is we 3D Print a scaffold or a design or a model, later on we just remove one material and then we just feed the heart cells on the material just for the application of cardiac patches application."
"In the first approach they used to inject the heart cells into the damaged location but the heart cells don't stay put and they tend to migrate to some other location. So in the second approach what the researchers have done is that they have used a cardiac patch and they placed over the damaged location - but in this case the alignment of the cells, of the heart cells, is quite important, it doesn't happen in case of the current cardiac patches.
Source: Muthu Vellayappan
"So my research mainly aims to get the aligned heart cells just to be a more effective cardiac patch, so that we can fix this heart problem."
"We will print a model and then we will place the heart cells on the model. Later on we will use this heart cells loaded models as a cardiac patch," he adds.
"However it could be a while before this device hits the market."
Mr Vellayappan said "any medical device which we are inventing or developing it takes a lot of time testing, that's because it involves a human as well. So as of now, we are in the initial stage."
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