BME 2.0: Engineering the Future of Medicine

Abstract

If the 20th century was the age of mapping and controlling the external world, the 21st century is the biomedical age of mapping and controlling the biological internal world. The biomedical age is bringing new technological breakthroughs for sensing and controlling human biomolecules, cells, tissues, and organs, which underpin new frontiers in the biomedical discovery, data, biomanufacturing, and translational sciences. This article reviews what we believe will be the next wave of biomedical engineering (BME) education in support of the biomedical age, what we have termed BME 2.0. BME 2.0 was announced on October 12 2017 at BMES 49 (https://www.bme.jhu.edu/news-events/news/miller-opens-2017-bmes-annual-meeting-with-vision-for-new-bme-era/). We present several principles upon which we believe the BME 2.0 curriculum should be constructed, and from these principles, we describe what view as the foundations that form the next generations of curricula in support of the BME enterprise. The core principles of BME 2.0 education are (a) educate students bilingually, from day 1, in the languages of modern molecular biology and the analytical modeling of complex biological systems; (b) prepare every student to be a biomedical data scientist; (c) build a unique BME community for discovery and innovation via a vertically integrated and convergent learning environment spanning the university and hospital systems; (d) champion an educational culture of inclusive excellence; and (e) codify in the curriculum ongoing discoveries at the frontiers of the discipline, thus ensuring BME 2.0 as a launchpad for training the future leaders of the biotechnology marketplaces. We envision that the BME 2.0 education is the path for providing every student with the training to lead in this new era of engineering the future of medicine in the 21st century.

Fig. 1.

Topics in nature biomedical engineering [42] largely represent the BME focus areas, which are emerging nationwide including biomedical imaging and medical devices, biomechanics and mechanobiology, computational medicine, genetic engineering and systems biology, digital health and biomedical data science, neuroengineering, and immuno, regenerative, and tissue engineering.

Fig. 2.

Representation of the modern BME 2.0 curriculum shown following a vertically integrating pyramid structure in which all activities continue throughout the 4 years: 2 years of advanced BME practice built upon a foundation of life science and quantitative training. All 4 years feature project-based learning coupled with translation and/or clinical insertion as an endpoint.

Fig. 3.

Depicting biomedical data science as a marriage between classical systems and computational mechanistic modeling of complex biological systems coupled to the data-driven discovery modeling of modern machine learning. These 2 modeling approaches together form the effective pairing of biophysics-informed modeling.

Fig. 4.

Preponderance word cloud of departments associated to 2019 to 2020 biomedical engineering project teams at Johns Hopkins University.

Fig. 5.

Project-based learning teams in the areas of mechanical devices, medical devices/imaging, and biomedical data science and computational medicine showing a rapid growth in data science projects since the inception of the 2017 core curriculum in biomedical data science at Johns Hopkins. Mechanical refers to projects where the solution uses mechanical actions, surgical tools, catheter systems, percutaneous feeding tubes, etc.

Fig. 6.

Left: Growth of total number of BME postings in Johns Hopkins online jobs. Right: Summer internship for Johns Hopkins Department of Biomedical Engineering juniors showing growth in data science, computation, and imaging.

Fig. 7.

Left: Placement of BME graduates in industry far exceeds other career paths in regions with emphasis on medical technology. Right: Placement of BME graduates in biotech industry exceeds traditional engineering disciplines. Data taken from Department of Biomedical Engineering at University of Minnesota.