Four OHSU startup companies shared their stories as part of the university’s virtual Innovation Day event on Thursday, showcasing technologies touching on precision medicine, imaging, prevention of perinatal depression and stent design.
Faculty developed each company’s core technology, with institutional support for patent development, mentorship and connections to investors and industry contacts. Several also received grants.
The daylong event brought the entrepreneurs together with potential investors, an effort to unite various parties within the institution working to spin out technology.
Here is a brief rundown of the four startups.
CytoImage: CEO Dan Snyder, formerly president of MolecularMD, said the company is trying to usher in a new era in functional precision medicine by providing insights into drug sensitivity and resistance. Genomic tumor profiling has grown into a $5 billion market, but it fails to provide therapy for 85% of patients, he said. The key is to measure cellular response.
“We’re entering a new space: single cell functional precision medicine,” Snyder said. “We’re measuring the drug effects on those cells.”
CytoImage is focused on blood cancers and is still in the pre-clinical stage. Associate Professor Tania Vu and Dr. Thomas Jacob of the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute established the company in 2020, along with the Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Inherent Targeting: About 50 million patients a year suffer surgical nerve injuries, said Connor Barth, who cofounded the company with Summer Gibb and Lei Wang.
“Nerve damage haunts patients and surgeons and has lasting side effects,” Barth said.
The reason it’s such a problem is that surgeons rely on “naked eye visualization,” and often the surgical site is messy, making it impossible to see the nerves with the naked eye.
Inherent Targeting developed a nerve-specific imaging agent that allows a rapid highlighting of the nerves that can be visualized in real time, Barth said.
“It allows surgeons to save time, reduce costs and improve outcomes,” he said.
Center M Inc.: The startup offers a low-cost, scalable health equity-focused prenatal care solution to prevent perinatal depression. The Center M solution can be delivered alongside standard prenatal care by any clinic. It is being piloted at two OHSU clinics, one in the Richmond neighborhood and the other in Scapoose.
“This is prevention-focused, as opposed to treatment-focused,” said David Starr, an external founder of Center M. Ellen Tilden, an assistant professor in the School of Nursing, is the co-founder.
Auxetics: This startup was founded by “three doctors who don’t know anything about medicine,” said co-founder Dr. John Kaufman.
Their focus is venous stents, which are used to open occluded veins, especially in the lower extremities. For more than 30 years, stents have focused on radial force and flexibility, but Auxetics developed "a fundamental design change."
The founders, including OHSU clinicians Dr. Ramsey Al-Hakim and Dr. Khashayar Farsad, hope to take the technology from “observations at the bedside to the lab and hopefully back out again,” Kaufman said.
