Wells Competition Helps Student Scientists Become Storytellers

For Shanae Butler, the Michael G. Wells Student Healthcare Competition taught her that translating scientific discovery into an innovation with commercial potential required honing a new skill: storytelling.

“People like a story with a beginning and an end that has a clear plot and intentionality behind it,” said Butler, a bioengineering PhD student. “Participating in Wells, I learned a lot about storytelling and the importance of knowing who your audience is.”

In the eight months since she took the top prize in the 2023 Wells Competition, Butler has a great story to tell on her progress toward commercialization.

She is working in the lab of Bryan Brown, associate professor in the Department of Bioengineering. He and her co-founder, Asim Ejaz, assistant professor in the Department of Plastic Surgery at the Pitt School of Medicine, are working to advance a perfusion technology for repurposing skin that is discarded from surgeries to be used instead for disease modeling, drug discovery and cosmetics testing.

“We are still working on the science behind the idea. We were recently awarded funding from the Chancellor’s Gap Fund,” she said, referring to a fund administered by the Innovation Institute, part of the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (OIE), to assist promising Pitt innovations in clearing pre-commercialization hurdles, including technology validation experiments, prototype optimization and market assessment, among others.

“We are also working on tightening up our value proposition for potential customers, and for that we are participating in the Pitt Ventures Startup Academy. We are pushing toward commercialization and making something of this company by trying to make it the most successful, de-risked idea we possibly can.”

Butler recommends the Wells competition for students interested in exploring the business side of innovation.

“I grew a lot as a scientist and a businessperson in a short space of time. A lot of that was catalyzed by participating in the Wells competition. Not only the money, but mentorship comes with it. You become part of this ecosystem where everyone remembers you and are invested in your success as an individual,” she said.

Shanae Butler (middle) receives her first place prize last October with the Wells competition judges and Evan Facher, Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (right).

Gilgal Anseh (middle holding ceremonial check) receives his second place prize with the 2023 Wells Competition judges and Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Evan Facher  (right).

 Jatin Singh (left) and Grant Kokenberger, pose with Priya Amin, Innovation Institute entrepreneur in residence and director of the Wells Competition. They placed third in the 2023 competition.

Jeff Garanich, director of innovation programming at the OIE, said that Butler’s journey from the Wells Competition to the Gap Fund to the Startup Academy is emblematic of the support available to advance an innovation toward commercialization.

“While no two paths are exactly alike, we are able to connect Pitt innovators with the training, mentoring and funding, both from inside the university, and from external partners, that they need to accelerate from idea to impact,” he said.

The two other winners in the 2023 Wells Competition have also made strong progress since receiving their awards.

Gilgal Ansah, PhD student in the Rehab Neural Engineering Laboratory at the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, is working with 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.

Ansah said the $15,000 second place award has helped to hire a student to join their team to evaluate the materials for the device insole and to power the pressure sensor. The team is working toward having a prototype by the end of 2024 and to hire a full-time engineer.

“I want to see this become a viable product that people can use,” Anseh said.

To that end the team is currently participating in an NSF I-Corps commercialization short course.

“We are learning more about how to commercialize the technology and how we can enter the market. To do that we are meeting people that will end up using the device to better understand how to design it,” he said.

Jatin Singh, part of team 3D X-Ray, which received the $5,000 third place award, said his team has completed an I-Corps short course and has applied for a grant through the National Institutes of Health to continue its research into their technology to enhance the diagnostic accuracy of pneumonia by using 2D CXR data, reaching precision levels comparable to 3D computed tomography (CT) diagnoses.

He has since graduated with his undergraduate degree in emergency medicine and is applying to medical school but is taking a gap year in between as he continues to work to commercialize his team’s innovation.

“What I learned from Wells is that the more time you spend with the entrepreneurs in residence from the Innovation Institute, the better you will perform,” he said, adding that he recommends teams competing in Wells set aside a dedicated block of time in their schedules each week to work on their project and investor pitch.