I visited the Johnson & Johnson site in Irvine today. The parking was huge with multiple buildings. I was told that the site at Irvine is mainly focusing on Medtech, especially medical devices for heart disease or vision care. As a graduate student at UC Irvine, I am grateful for this opportunity provided by the GPS-STEM, which prepares STEM scientists for a variety of careers within the STEM workforce, and empowers us to become not only skilled scientists but also polished professionals. A few events I attended previously include an AbbVie coffee chat and a J&J fireside chat. I can say GPS-STEM of UCI organizes great events.

What did I learn today? First of all, we had three groups. I like how everything is organized by dividing us into three sections and rotating through different activities. So, instead of them talking once, they have to introduce/showcase the same thing three times! And, all of this is just for us to get a better opportunity to ask questions and to be involved.

1. We started with hearing a presentation from the Intellectual Property (IP) people. Johnson & Johnson was the first company to make cotton white, sterile, and absorbent back in the 1886. But they did not patent this so that other companies can adopt it to save patients’ lives. J&J’s first patent is for dental floss in 1898.

2. In the electrophysiology demo lab, I watched how J&J can use a catheter empowered with electricity to ablate a small piece of pork tissue. This technique aims to reroute the electric current in the heart if there is a problem and navigate the electricity into a normal pathway. The R&D team is actively researching the width and depth of the ablation under different conditions, such as different wattages or conductive buffers. This technique has a high success rate with only 13% of patients showing recurrence, and they might want to re-visit and get another ablation to fix.

3. Lastly, I visited the vision demo lab. I got the chance to watch and perform a “cataract surgery” on a plastic model using the VERITAS vision system. I took a needle-like device and inserted it into the eyes, pressed a paddle on my foot to control the ultrasound probe to break up the cloudy cataract (crystallin proteins) into small pieces, and vacuumed the small pieces with the probe. The technique is now a standard technique called Phacoemulsification. The patients will be anesthetized while performing the surgery, and it took only 2 hours to complete. Patients reach a full recovery after 24 hrs.