Four students from the Faculty of Architecture and Design at the University of los Andes —Isabel Pulido, Paola Camacho, Laura Calderón, and Juan Angulo— won the Biodesign Challenge 2019, an international competition in which designers, artists, scientists, and engineers imagine the future of biotechnology. The awards ceremony was held on June 21 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
Their project, PseudoFreeze, is a refrigeration system that does not require electricity. It uses a protein from the bacterium Pseudomonas syringae —the same one that helps form hail and snow— to freeze water at 4°C. Its first application is an ergonomic container for transporting vaccines to rural areas.
The team stood out among 36 proposals from nine countries, with finalists from Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and RMIT, and was the first Latin American team to win. The project was born in the course "Studio 7: Biodesign Challenge," taught by Professors Giovanna Danies and Carolina Obregón.
Outlets such as Forbes highlighted that the system does not require batteries or external energy. That student project is now NanoFreeze.
