From undergrads to PhD candidates, Students Impress Judges with Grasp of Technology and Business Acumen
Shanae Butler came to Pitt to pursue a PhD in bioengineering. She could be on her way to leaving as the head of her own company after being awarded the top prize in the 2023 Michael G. Wells Student Healthcare Competition.
As Butler, a native of Jamaica, explored different career options for when she earns her degree, she met Dr. Asim Ejaz, assistant professor in the Department of Plastic Surgery in the Pitt School of Medicine, in a Commercialization of New Technologies class – jointly offered by Pitt’s Katz Graduate School of Business and the School of Law.
It wasn’t long before she signed on as the entrepreneurial lead on a project to explore the commercial potential of an innovation from Dr. Ejaz’s lab – a system and process of keeping human skin discarded from plastic surgery procedures viable for extended periods that can be used as a platform for disease modeling, drug discovery and cosmetics testing.
On a brisk November morning in the William Pitt Union, she deftly pitched the innovation to a panel of expert judges, and confidently answered a barrage of questions about the science underlying the technology, the regulatory approval pathway, the intellectual property protection, and the go-to-market strategy for the innovation.
Impressed by the potential impact the technology could have, and by Butler’s impeccable performance, the Organ Perfusion Flap team was awarded the competition’s top prize of $20,000.
“(Ms. Butler) was clear and focused on the problem her team’s technology can solve and did really well with our questions,” said Dr. Jeremy Kimmel, an adjunct professor of bioengineering at the Swanson School of Engineering and former senior executive at Pitt spinout ALung Technologies, who served as one of the competition’s judges. “She came across as extremely knowledgeable and capable of moving the innovation through the next stages of development.”
Priya Amin, Entrepreneur in Residence at the Innovation Institute, part of the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, said that the students representing each of this year’s seven finalist teams demonstrated significant progress from the beginning stages to the final pitches.
“They are an extremely talented group who were coach-able and accepted and incorporated feedback well. I hope to see them all continue moving their teams’ innovations forward,” she said.
Butler said she is learning the skills of innovation and entrepreneurship “as I go”, with the goal of creating a startup around the Skin Perfusion Flap technology. She pointed to her participation earlier this year in a month-long NSF I-Corp hybrid short course where she was able to travel to Boston for the Bio International conference, the world’s largest biotech gathering. There she met potential partners and customers for her team’s innovation to learn more about the market need across different research and clinical applications.
She said the Wells award will be used to develop software prototypes for the perfusion system.
“This has been an exciting time, and I am learning every day what I am capable of doing,” she said.
The same determination to move his team’s technology from the lab to the market animates Gilgal Ansah, the PhD student in the Rehab Neural Engineering Labs, where he has been working alongside associate professor Lee Fisher to develop LimbSense, an implant device system that helps people with leg amputations feel sensations of pressure and touch from prosthetic legs as though it was coming from their missing limb.
The LimbSense team captured the second prize of $15,000. Ansah said the funds will be used to develop a prototype of the shoe insert that will be connected to the implant to deliver the proper signal when the user is standing or walking. Ansah said he will also be registering for an NSF I-Corps short course to begin conducting the customer discovery process as the prototype work begins.
Receiving the third place prize of $5,000 are Jatin Singh, Grant Kokenberger of team 3D X-Ray, one of two teams led by Pitt undergraduates. Kokenberger is a sophomore studying computational biology who states in his LinkedIn profile he intends to “research and develop novel technology and bring to market innovative solutions.”
Singh is a senior studying emergency medicine. He is a paramedic who volunteers teaching data science to high school students and leading a Disaster Action Team for the Red Cross.
Mr. Wells, a two-time Pitt alum (EDUC’90, EDUC’92G), is a successful healthcare entrepreneur and investor who wanted to give back to the university in a meaningful way for him by initiating the Michael G. Wells Student Healthcare Competition to provide seed funding to Pitt students who wanted to explore commercialization of Pitt research.
In its 13 years, the Wells competition has had more than 80 student finalists. Innovation teams that have competed in the Wells competition have gone on to form 20 startup companies and have raised nearly $30 million in additional funding through the university or private investors.
Ms. Amin added, “Another encouraging facet of this year’s Wells competition is that each of the prize-winning teams included a woman and/or person of color, reflecting the OIE’s efforts to support diversity in innovation and entrepreneurship at Pitt.”
In addition to Dr. Kimmel, other judges included Dr. Nadia Boutaoui, founder and CEO of NanoNares Inc., Dr. Parul Nisha, senior director of clinical development at Cook MyoSite, Megan Shaw, interim executive director at Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhous and Mr. Wells.
Below are the seven finalist teams and their innovations. Teams are composed of Entrepreneurial Leads (EL), Principal Investigators (PI) and Business Mentor (BM)
Aneurisk
EL: Micah Guffey
PI: Dr. David Vorp
BM: Rick Miller
Aneurisk has developed an AI-enabled product, replacing the need for trained personnel to segment and reconstruct images to obtain 3D aneurysm surfaces and perform surface shape and wall stress analyses. The proposed approach significantly saves overall costs associated with abdominal aortic aneurysm patient management by reducing the need for long-term image-based AAA monitoring and improves AAA repair timing based on personalized risk scores without adding additional time to clinical workflows for clinicians.
Biocompatible Artificial Muscles
EL: Sivakumar Irla
PI: Dr. M Ravi Shankar
BM: David Smith
Biocompatible soft robots that manipulate alongside living tissue by leveraging breakthroughs in materials, their 3D printing into freeform geometries and development of innervated control systems. Accomplishing this can transform biomedical devices in sectors ranging from surgical devices, active implants, physical therapy, and augmentation of human performance. We have shown the feasibility of actuating them remotely to sustained actuation cycles without being limited by implanted batteries or requiring transdermal electrical feedthroughs.
Delta Cuff
EL: Cyrus Darvish
PI: Dr. Tim Chung
BM: Jan Berkow
The TDP cuff is a device designed to predict the risk of a severe blood clot complication called post thrombotic syndrome. It is like a blood pressure cuff that measures vein flexibility, combined with a machine learning computer program. The pair can foresee who might develop PTS before symptoms appear. It is a unique, non-invasive approach to provide early warnings and better care for patients suffering from deep vein thrombosis.
LimbSense
EL: Gilgal Ansah
PI: Dr. Lee Fisher
BM: Brian Sullivan
A system that helps people with leg amputations feel sensations like pressure and touch from the prosthetic leg as though it was coming from their missing limb
SimuClip
EL: Jason Lee
PI: Dr. Tim Chung
BM: Alan West
SimuClip is a product concept to replace the current use of electrocautery-based devices in vasculature harvesting procedures. SimuClip proposes a biodegradable, bladed metal clip concept and a customer clip delivery system to simultaneously cut-and-clamp vasculature vessels and vessel branches. Replacing current electrocautery-based methods with a mechanical cut-and-clamp method will reduce unnecessary vessel damage and the reopening of closed vessels, resulting in better patient outcomes.
devices in sectors ranging from surgical devices, active implants, physical therapy, and augmentation of human performance. We have shown the feasibility of actuating them remotely to sustained actuation cycles without being limited by implanted batteries or requiring transdermal electrical feedthroughs.
Skin Perfusion Flap
EL: Shanae Butler
PI: Dr. Asim Ejaz
BM: Justin Olshavsky
A perfusion system and a process capable of keeping human skin tissue flap viable for an extended period for up to 3 weeks and beyond. We intend to use the perfused skin tissue as a platform for disease modeling and drug discovery.
3D X-ray
EL: Jatin Singh, Grant Kokenberger
PI: Dr. Jaintao Pu
M: Gaby Isturiz
To reduce deaths and morbidity, early detection is essential, and to address this pressing need for improved identification, our team aims to develop an innovative artificial intelligence (AI) tool, 3D- XRay. This tool is designed to significantly enhance the diagnostic accuracy of pneumonia by using 2D CXR data, reaching precision levels comparable to 3D computed tomography (CT) diagnoses.