Two Recent Awards And One Investment Demonstrate Value Of Biomedical Engineering Education At The U.
This year’s Bench-2-Bedside winner, team Cinluma, includes two bioengineering students and won $15,000. Meanwhile, a new surgical device company consisting of two bioengineering alumni won the OneStart Americas 2015 award and received $150,000. In addition, a new company called 6S Medical, created by bioengineering students, received a $20,000 investment from the Campus Founders Fund.
The Bench-2-Bedside competition
is organized by the U’s Center for Medical Innovation and is designed to help medical, engineering, and business students translate new ideas into medical devices. Its winner, team Cinluma, was formed just three months prior to the competition and is developing a heated catheter that can be used to destroy pre-cancerous lesions in the treatment of cervical cancer.
The Cinluma team consisted of Kristopher Loken, Timothy Pickett, Brian Charlesworth, Jennwood Chen, Ashley Trane and Ashley Langell. Loken is finishing up his MBA/MS degree in bioengineering, and Pickett is working on a master’s degree in mechanical engineering. More than 20 teams competed in this year’s contest.
“I really couldn’t stop smiling last night,” Loken said about winning the Bench-2-Bedside competition. “It was exhilarating. It was validation for all of the hard work our team put into it. It was amazing.”
The team has won $15,000 to further develop the device in addition to getting free office space for six months, free business consulting, legal services and web development.
A three-person surgical device company that includes two U bioengineering alumni won the OneStart Americas 2015 competition and received $150,000. The company consists of CEO and founder Dolly Holt, who recently completed her PhD in bioengineering at the University of Utah; COO Phil Casper, who studied public health and business at Brigham Young University; and Derek Jewell, an R&D engineer at BD Biosciences who just graduated with his bachelor’s in bioengineering at the University of Utah. OneStart is a global accelerator program aimed at helping healthcare and life science entrepreneurs under the age of 36 build sustainable, commercially viable businesses.
The surgical device company was one of two startups that went through an intense five-month training and mentoring program, which culminated in pitching their ideas to investors and industry experts in London for the OneStart Europe finalists and San Francisco for the OneStart Americas finalists. The 20 finalist startups were selected from an initial pool of over 630 healthcare startups from across the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific.
Another company, 6S Medical LLC, was established in 2013 by Mike Fogarty, Spencer Madsen and Pablo Johnson, each of whom were biomedical engineering students at the time. 6S recently received a $20,000 investment from Campus Founders Fund.
6S is developing a biodegradable implant to eliminate surgical failures in repairing ligament and tendon injuries and prevent muscle atrophy by reducing the need for post-operative immobilization.
Campus Founders Fund (CFF) is an early-stage seed fund at the University of Utah. This is the first investment by student-run CFF in a company started at the U.
6S is focused on creating innovative and successful medical devices that improve patient outcomes and decrease healthcare costs. The company’s first product, troClosure™, is a surgical device used in minimally invasive surgeries. It fills the unmet need in the billion-dollar global laparoscopic device market by providing a single, cost-effective device that facilitates access into the abdomen while also providing wound closure at the end of the case. When compared to the current standard of care, troClosure is safer, faster and more consistent. The team has already filed for intellectual property protection to strengthen their competitive position in the market.
6S Medical LLC anticipates completion of validation studies and submission of its FDA application by the end of this year. 6S Medical’s co-founders, Spencer Madsen and Michael Fogarty (both PhD students in bioengineering at the U), are running the business today while pursuing their degrees.
“The University of Utah has a strong history of innovation in the medical device space, especially with competitions such as Bench-2-Bedside and such programs as bioDesign and bioInnovate in the bioengineering department,” says Mark Khoury, a member of the CFF investment team and bioengineering department alum. “Campus Founders Fund is thrilled to support the startups that result from this innovation, and we’re excited to see 6S Medical revolutionize minimally invasive surgery.”
For a list of Bench-2-Bedside competition winners go to:
http://healthcare.utah.edu/publicaffairs/news/2015/04/04-09-15_cinluna.php
.
For more information about OneStart and the London OneStart 2015 winner go to:
OneStart 2015 Winners Announced
. Or to see a video created when they were semi-finalists, go to:
OneStart Americas 2015 Semi-finalist: Ligadon – Dolly Holt
.