In a year that threw the world a giant curve ball, the Pitt Ventures Student Challenge went virtual for 2020 and hit a home run.
LifeX Labs was launched in 2017 to serve the needs of a growing life science industry base in the Pittsburgh region and fill a large gap in services for biotech startups as identified in the Brookings Institute report “Capturing the next economy: Pittsburgh’s rise as an innovation city”.
Pitt Innovator Kacey Marra Forms Startup to commercialize Nerve Repair Research By Michael Yeomans The path to impact for basic life science research can be long and filled with big gaps: in time and in resources. Kacey Marra’s (right in photo) research on repairing large gaps in traumatically injured nerves is a case in point. Marra had come back to Pitt in 2002, where she had earned her undergraduate degree and a PhD in organic chemistry in 1996, and set up a lab following a research stint at neighboring Carnegie Mellon University. About 15 years ago, she filed an invention disclosure with the Innovation Institute for a device to repair severe nerve injuries with long gaps (more than two inches). A provisional patent application was filed and she continued her research after attracting the attention of the Department of Defense, which saw the opportunity to advance treatments for soldiers injured in battle. “I met a soldier who had been shot through calf and had no sensation in his foot. To create something that could help people like him live a more independent and fulfilling life strengthened my resolve to do what it takes to commercialize our lab’s discoveries,” Marra said.
July 23, 2020 A driven group of Pitt faculty and students worked the dog days of summer to determine the commercial potential of their research. With the assistance of volunteer business mentors they completed the six-session Pitt Ventures First Gear workshop this week and delivered highly polished presentations of how their discoveries could improve people’s lives or make healthcare delivery more efficient. The presentations were so good the judges took significantly longer than usual before returning with their decision on who to award additional funding to accelerate their projects toward commercialization. The top award of $15,000 went to Charge OR, a team led by UPMC anesthesiologist Evan Lebovitz, who recently earned his MBA from Pitt’s Katz School of Business.
When we last checked in with Jason Rose, assistant professor of medicine and biomedical engineering (center) in the summer of 2018, he had just licensed a technology he had helped to develop in the lab of Mark Gladwin, Chair of the Department of Medicine, to form a startup called Globin Solutions. (Gladwin is pictured on the left, with Globin's chief scientific officer Jesus Tejero on the right.) Rose had taken advantage of updated university policy that allows faculty to take a role in startups created from their own research. Globin was one of a record 23 spinouts to emerge from Pitt in fiscal year 2018. The company had recently raised a $5 million financing, and Rose was looking forward to preparing for pharmacology studies on the compounds being developed to act as an antidote to carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning, which affects roughly 50,000 people a year in the U.S. and results in approximately 2,000 deaths. Let’s check in on the progress since then: