Jell-O has never been associated with any life-saving inventions, but Timothy Lu, winner of the 2008 Collegiate Inventors Competition, had other ideas.

Lu discovered a way to break through nearly impenetrable protective biofilm, which surrounds and protects the bacteria that cause many– ailments, preventing patient recovery. This is one of the crucial obstacles in treating patients with conditions like cystic fibrosis, a hereditary disease for which there is no cure.

‘The analogy we use is fruit Jell-O,’ Lu, a visiting scholar in biomedical engineering professor Jim Collins’ lab at Boston University, said. ‘The fruit is the bacteria themselves and the Jell-O is the protective layer.’

Antibiotics are intended to penetrate this biofilm to kill detrimental bacteria, but they often fail to do so very effectively, keeping infected patients sick. With rising costs for developing new antibiotics to combat the bacteria that cause infections, pharmaceutical companies have slowed efforts to develop them. To bypass this problem, Lu worked independently modifying viruses that can weaken bacteria’s defense systems by chewing up the protective biofilm.

By using these modified bacteria-infecting viruses, Lu was able to see 99.9 percent more biofilm removal than what is removed using the standard antibiotic treatment. He modified the viruses, which have been used in medicine for more than 100 years, ‘to make them hundreds or thousands of times more effective than they used to be,’ he said.

The biofilm project was one of two projects involving bacteria that convinced the National Inventors Hall of Fame Foundation to award Lu the $25,000 grand prize on Nov. 20.

‘There’s a variety of different genes [in the bacteria themselves] that get turned on when antibiotics go into cells,’ Lu said. ‘When we deliver our virus into the cells, we can knock down a lot of those genes. If you use our virus with antibiotics, you can get 30,000 times more killing of the bacteria.’

Lu experimented using bacteria-infected mice, which are good indicators of how the human body works. The mice treated with his virus and the antibiotics had an 80 percent survival rate, compared with the 20 percent rate he observed in mice given the antibiotics alone.

‘It was great to be recognized, but the real part we’re excited about is getting the news out there that this technology is arriving,’ Lu said. ‘What we really want to do is get this into the hospital and treat patients.’

Collins, who received $5,000 for advising Lu, said he is proud of the recognition his student received.

‘Tim is highly innovative, driven by practical applications,’ Collins, BU’s first Howard Hughes Medical Center Investigator, said. ‘I think he’s going to be one of the leaders in synthetic biology and bioengineering.’

Jeffrey Dollinger, president of Invent Now Inc., a subsidiary of the National Inventors Hall of Fame Foundation, said the judges of the Collegiate Inventors Competition are inventors and inductees into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, making them among the most difficult people to impress.’

‘They’ve seen in their careers the kinds of transcendent technology that really moves things forward,’ he said. ‘When they recommend someone like Timothy Lu, it’s certified as someone who shows a lot of promise.’