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 your work as a Pitt researcher begins to yield discoveries that may translate into products or services that can make a difference in people’s lives, the first step in that journey is filing an invention disclosure with the Innovation Institute. We recognize that the pandemic response has disrupted many of your research programs. While far from ideal, the current situation may be an opportunity to begin assessing the commercial potential of your work. Innovation Institute licensing managers are key partners throughout the innovation commercialization process. As a group, they have helped usher thousands of Pitt discoveries from disclosure to patenting or copyrighting, and finally to licensing. As a result, the lives of millions of people around the world have been improved--even saved--by discoveries made here. Here they offer their advice for submitting a strong invention disclosure that can help start the commercialization process off on the right foot.
Since 2016, the American Heart Association has awarded 62 grants totaling $10.3M to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh. The AHA's mission has recently expanded beyond cardiovascular and stroke science to now include cerebrovascular and brain health research, with a focus on overall health and well-being across the lifespan. Glenn H. Dillon, Director of Research Operations from the American Heart Association, presented grant funding and other opportunities earlier this year. Check out this pre-recorded session from the Office of Economic Partnerships to see what you missed.
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:
The Innovation Institute's Big Idea Center for student innovation and entrepreneurship recently concluded its annual Randall Family Big Idea Competition. This year's competition was interrupted by the pandemic in mid-stream, but the center's staff and the students forged ahead to complete it virtually and awarded the $100,000 in prize money on April 22. We caught up with Noah Pyles of the grand prize winning team, Polycarbin, to discuss how three medical school students became entrepreneurs and what their next steps are to bring to life their idea to reduce the amount of biomedical waste that ends up in landfills or incinerated.