Description
Within this particular detailed file related to 600 local entrepreneurs who received assistance.
@PittInnovates
2014 Annual Report
2
Impact at a Glance
4
Year in Review
8
Briefs
11
Engaging
Innovators and
Entrepreneurs
12
Innovators
28
Staff Directory
We continue to foster
strong partnerships
across campus and
beyond that spark
creative, innovative,
and collaborative
collisions of ideas,
leading to fascinating
new innovations , as
you’ll read in this year’s
annual report.
I
nnovation is alive and thriving at the University of Pittsburgh.
Whether we’re talking about Pitt Innovators who submitted nearly 300 invention
disclosures to the University for commercial consideration in ?scal year 2014, the
more than 125 students who recently competed for $100,000 in prizes in the Randall
Family Big Idea Competition, the dozens on campus who participated in Institute
education programs, the more than 600 local entrepreneurs who received assistance
here, innovation and entrepreneurship are transforming Pitt’s academic culture.
Everyone has played a major role in making the University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
an unequivocal success during its ?rst year.
The University launched the Institute last fall, bringing together its Of?ce of Technology
Management, Of?ce of Enterprise Development, and Institute for Entrepreneurial Excellence
(IEE). Together, we continue to facilitate the translation of research into innovations and
startups that change the world. We also continue to leverage our entrepreneurial expertise
to support Pittsburgh entrepreneurs.
But we also are developing new programs aimed at supporting innovation and entrepre-
neurship among Pitt students. We’re developing a prestartup incubator, experiential learning
opportunities, and a living-learning community, along with Startup Smashes, Popups, and
other activities.
This transition year likewise has included new internal support for this activity, including
new leadership across the organization, new executives in residence, dozens of business
mentors, new corporate relations strategies, a new development partnership with local
startup accelerator Idea Foundry, and our new interactive Web portal at innovation.pitt.edu.
Our Web site—a work in progress—is designed to serve not only Pitt Innovators but
also students, Pittsburgh-area entrepreneurs, investors, those interested in licensing Pitt
innovations, and IEE members.
Meanwhile, we continue to foster partnerships that spark creative, innovative, and collabo-
rative collisions of ideas, leading to fascinating new innovations, as you’ll read in this report.
One of our primary goals is to promote and facilitate such convergences.
It is my privilege to be part of this exciting cultural transformation, and I’m grateful for
the support we have received from Pitt’s senior leadership and our community partners.
Make no mistake, this is a long-term community effort fueled by the imagination,
creativity, and ingenuity of Pitt Innovators and their collaborators as well as by the driving
entrepreneurial spirit that has permeated this growing region. Consequently, we can expect
great things ahead.
And the University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute is happy to be right in the middle
of it all. Remember … @PittInnovates!
Respectfully,
Marc S. Malandro
Associate Vice Chancellor for Technology Management and Commercialization
University of Pittsburgh
Thriving Innovation at Pitt
2014 Annual Report
1
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
Impact at a Glance
FY2014
$697.6
MILLION IN SPONSORED
RESEARCH funding received
by Pitt researchers
to support world-class
discovery and
innovation
6
STARTUP COMPANIES
launched around
Pitt innovations
104
PITT-BASED
STARTUPS
since 1996
$10.58
MILLION IN CAPITAL attained
by local businesses with
help from the Institute’s IEE
150
LICENSES/OPTIONS
completed for Pitt innovations
to outside partners
including startups
74
U.S. PATENTS
issued for Pitt innovations,
a new record, boosting
Pitt’s patent portfolio
to 615 issued
U.S. patents
55
LOCAL ENTREPRENEURS
ASSISTED in starting
or buying new businesses
646
BUSINESS OWNERS
COUNSELED
about business
growth issues
for a total of
6,294 hours
512
LOCAL JOBS
saved or created through
counseling
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
2
$41.8
MILLION
TOTAL REVENUE from
Pitt’s commercialization
activities
125+
STUDENTS
11 teams
4 ?rst-place teams
$100,000 in prizes
Randall Family
Big Idea Competition
PITT SPINOUT COMPANIES:
Western Oncolytics, Ltd.
Diamond Kinetics, Inc.
Nanovision Diagnostics, Inc.
Peptilogics, Inc.
UbiCue, Inc.
Sofregen Medical, Inc.
Commercialization
Entrepreneurship
Economic
Development
2014 Annual Report
3
Year in Review
uccess requires the new University of
Pittsburgh Innovation Institute and its
interrelated parts to interact in meaningful
ways with many constituent audiences, from
Pitt Innovators and their ideas and students with
entrepreneurial aspirations to local entrepreneurs
looking for assistance in starting or growing
companies and others who are looking for the
next great technology to license.
S
The Institute’s collective performance depends
on its ability to effectively serve those participating
groups; facilitate educational opportunities and
assistance; and leverage both its resources and those
of its active partners to commercialize innovations,
start companies, and contribute to the economic
development of the Pittsburgh region.
As such, the Institute’s ?scal year 2014 performance
re?ects a ?urry of activity aimed at promoting and
fostering innovation development, commercializa-
tion, and entrepreneurship on campus and beyond.
Consider the following:
INVENTION DISCLOSURES
The Institute’s Of?ce of Technology Management
(OTM) received 274 invention disclosures from
Pitt Innovators for commercial consideration this
past year, up 7.9 percent from the previous year.
That brings the cumulative number of invention
disclosures to 3,160 submitted to OTM since the
establishment of the of?ce in 1996.
Perhaps just as important to the development of
an innovation culture at Pitt, though, is the fact
that this year’s number represents the collaborative
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
4
participation of at least 518 Pitt Innovators (faculty
members, staff members, and students who partic-
ipate in the commercialization process). It marks a
nearly 10 percent increase in participation over ?scal
year 2013. It also demonstrates a greater degree of
collaboration among innovators.
And that includes students and postdocs. In fact,
of the 518 participants, 165 were students or post-
docs—almost a third of the Pitt Innovators. That’s
exciting news for the Institute, which is trying to
build a more collaborative environment that provides
education and commercialization opportunities for
Pitt students as well as faculty and staff members.
LICENSES/OPTIONS
OTM’s licensing managers remained vigilant this
past year in their efforts to negotiate licensing and
option deals outside the University for Pitt inno-
vations—with startup support from the Institute’s
Of?ce of Enterprise Development (OED) as well as
its executives in residence. All told, OTM executed
150 licenses/options for Pitt technologies, bringing
the cumulative total since 1996 to 1,122.
This includes six new startup companies launched
by the University this past year as a result of OTM
and OED’s efforts, boosting the startup total to
104 startups launched since 1996. What it doesn’t
include are OED’s ongoing efforts in 2014 to work
with at least 22 innovations—from 17 different
academic departments—with startup potential and
then work with the Pitt Innovators behind those
innovations through a series of activities designed
to further develop those business opportunities for
possible startup.
U.S. PATENTS ISSUED
The University experienced another record year in
the number of new U.S. patents issued to Pitt for its
innovations. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Of?ce
(USPTO) awarded the University 74 patents—a
45 percent increase over the previous year’s issued
patents. This speaks well of Pitt Innovators, as well
as of the diligence of OTM and the legal support it
Invention Disclosures 274
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350
225
257
310
254
INVENTION DISCLOSURES
10
11
12
13
274
14
310
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80
33
37
49
51
U.S. PATENTS ISSUED
10
11
12
13
14
74
U.S. Patents Issued 74
0 50 100 150 200
80
105
132
155
LICENSES/OPTIONS
10
11
12
13
14
150
0
1
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
2
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
3
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
4
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
5
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
TOTAL REVENUE
$6,517,348
$6,080,834
$6,165,066
$6,797,639
Legal Fee Reimbursements
Licensing Income
10
11
12
13
$41,838,040
14
Total Revenue $41,838,040
Includes:
• Licensing Income $39,840,770
• Equity Sales $0
• Legal Fee Reimbursement $1,897,270
2014 Annual Report
5
Year in Review continued
receives. It also bodes well for USPTO, which has
been striving to reduce the continued backlog of
patent applications.
Since 1996, the University has built up a portfolio
of 615 patents based on Pitt innovations—244 of
them over the past ?ve years alone. Meanwhile, the
University submitted 88 new U.S. patent applications
to USPTO for consideration in ?scal year 2014.
TOTAL REVENUE
The Institute’s commercialization activities resulted
ultimately in the generation of $41.8 million in
revenue for the University in ?scal year 2014. That
?gure does include a onetime payment to Pitt of
$35.6 million as the result of a patent infringement
settlement from Varian Medical Systems, Inc. Also
included is $4.2 million in other licensing revenue
and $2 million in patent expense reimbursement.
ENTREPRENEURIAL ASSISTANCE,
EDUCATION, AND DEVELOPMENT
The Institute for Entrepreneurial Excellence (IEE),
which also is part of the Innovation Institute,
likewise remained active in ?scal year 2014 in
providing education, networking, and entrepreneur-
ial assistance for entrepreneurs and small businesses
throughout Southwestern Pennsylvania.
CONSULTING
IEE consultants invested 6,294 collective hours in
counseling 646 local business owners about growth
issues. Of those business owners, 266 were new
clients. It also assisted 55 local entrepreneurs in their
efforts to start new businesses. Included in that ?gure
are 10 entrepreneurs who recently acquired existing
businesses. IEE also reviewed 82 business plans.
TRAINING
IEE, through its Small Business Development
Center, Entrepreneurial Fellows Center, and Urban
Entrepreneurship Program, provided a total of
27 sessions of entrepreneurial training and
development to 466 people this past year.
FUNDING AND JOBS
Entrepreneurial clients seeking ?nancial help via IEE
were able to raise nearly $10.6 million in ?nancing
for their businesses thanks to the efforts of IEE and
its consultants. Client companies also increased their
domestic sales by more than $23 million as a result
of IEE’s assistance. Moreover, consulting efforts
helped client companies to save 440 jobs in the
region while also helping to create 72 new jobs.
Startup Activity
DIAMOND KINETICS, INC.
This Pittsburgh-based startup company
was launched to commercialize and market
a motion analytics-based device and suite
of computer software applications to help
baseball players select the optimal bat size
and improve their swing. The device was
developed by mechanical engineering and
materials science professor—and admitted
baseball fanatic—William “Buddy” Clark
in collaboration with Noel Perkins,
a mechanical engineering professor
at the University of Michigan. The
system conveys the motion analytics
via a paired mobile application.
(See pro?le on page 24.)
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
6
NANOVISION DIAGNOSTICS, INC.
Bioengineering and medicine professors Yang
Liu and Randall Brand developed a novel phase
microscopy-based optical system that can eliminate
distracting variables and provide an image that
maps cell architecture in three dimensions and can
be measured at the nanoscale. Their innovation has
become the basis for this Pittsburgh-based startup
company, which will focus on the early and more
accurate diagnosis of cancerous cells from biopsy
slides. Supporting their development efforts was
the competitive Coulter Translational Research
Partners II Program in the Swanson School of
Engineering. (See pro?le on page 12.)
PEPTILOGICS, INC.
This startup, currently under the guidance of
Pittsburgh-based nonpro?t startup accelerator Idea
Foundry, is working to develop novel therapeutic
solutions in advanced wound care, cystic ?brosis,
and biodefense around peptide antibiotics that kill
antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The rationally designed
peptides were developed by Ronald Montelaro,
a professor of micro-
biology and molecular
genetics, in collaboration
with postdoctoral scholar
Jonathan Steckbeck.
SOFREGEN
MEDICAL, INC.
Plastic surgery professors
Kacey Marra and J. Peter
Rubin, in collaboration
with researchers from Tufts University, have devel-
oped an injectable, porous silk scaffold to restore
volume and regenerate soft tissue defects. The new
material, which forms the basis of this new company,
can be injected dry or hydrated and alone, with
a carrier, or in lipoaspirate.
UBICUE, INC.
Andrea Fairman, then a PhD candidate in rehabili-
tation science and technology, and her team of Pitt
researchers developed a telerehabilitation platform
for the self-management of care to help clinicians
to communicate in real time with patients with
chronic conditions. Now an instructor in the School
of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Fairman has
launched this Pittsburgh-based company to further
develop this mobile app-based technology. UbiCue
currently is receiving assistance from local startup
accelerator Idea Foundry.
WESTERN ONCOLYTICS, LTD.
This startup has licensed novel
cancer therapies from Pitt that use
genetically engineered viruses to
attack only cancer cells of solid
tumor types while also
delivering therapeutic genes.
This therapy, called WO-12,
was developed by Stephen
Thorne, a professor of surgery
and immunology. It was designed
to stimulate a stronger and more
direct immune attack against the cancer
cells than other oncolytic therapies and, at the
same time, to remove blocks to immune activity
within the environment of the tumor.
2014 Annual Report
7
Briefs
A Real Lung-saver
If 33-year-old Oklahoman Jon Sacker, who this past year
suffered from lung transplant failure in his battle against
cystic ?brosis, hadn’t heard of Pittsburgh-based startup ALung
Technologies before, he certainly has now.
Thanks largely to ALung’s new Hemolung respiratory assist
device, an emergency approval by the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration, and his doctors, Sacker was able to survive
the wait for a new lung transplant at UPMC Presbyterian. He
had come to the Pittsburgh hospital in February 2014 for his
second transplant, hospital
of?cials said, but was too sick
to undergo the surgery. That’s
when hospital of?cials turned
to ALung for help.
ALung’s device, which
removes carbon dioxide
from the blood while putting
oxygen back into the blood,
helped improve Sacker’s
condition over the next month
until he was well enough for
another transplant. But to
use the device, which isn’t yet
approved by the FDA, the hos-
pital had to seek emergency
approval. The FDA approved
the request.
“Jon was in very critical
condition when he came to
Pittsburgh, and the Hemolung
was a lifesaver for him while waiting for his second lung trans-
plant,” Maria Crespo, associate medical director of UPMC’s
Lung Transplant Program, said in a prepared statement.
The device was developed largely by Pitt bioengineering
professor William Federspiel and his research team. The com-
pany, which already earned its CE Marking in the European
Union last year, meanwhile continues to seek FDA approval to
market Hemolung in the United States.
All About Innovation and
Economic Prosperity
That’s how the Association of Public and Land-grant
Universities categorized the University of Pittsburgh recently
when it of?cially awarded Pitt and 13 other universities a des-
ignation as Innovation and Economic Prosperity Universities.
The designation recognizes universities that work extensively
with public and private sector partners within their states and
local regions to promote and foster
economic development.
“This Innovation and Economic
Prosperity University designation is an
af?rmation of the key role that
the University of Pittsburgh is playing as a
leader of innovation and economic development in Western
Pennsylvania and beyond,” Mark Nordenberg, chancellor
emeritus, said at the time in a prepared statement.
Surgery, Shunts, and Signaling Sensors:
Eight Funded Projects, 25 Collaborators
Eight groups of faculty researchers from the Schools of the
Health Sciences and Swanson School of Engineering received a
collective $100,000 boost in funding this past year to further
develop medical devices emerging from some rather unique
collaborations.
Driving this effort is the Swanson School’s Center for Medical
Innovation, whose goal is to promote early stage R&D collab-
orations between the two schools that lead to innovations with
commercial promise. All told, 25 collaborators are participating
in the following eight projects, each of which has received
between $10,000 and $25,000:
• New morcellation device for laparoscopic surgery
that prevents the accidental release of cancerous tissue
into the body
• System for rapid, accurate prehospital management
of myocardial infarct patients through the use of novel
ECG signal processing techniques
• Novel low-pro?le ?uid drainage shunt for in-utero
treatment of fetal hydrocephalus
• New surgical meshes for the treatment of pelvic organ
prolapse that avoid the complications of current devices
• Wireless EEG sensor and signal processing system for
emergency medicine, critical care, and ambulatory
monitoring
• New suture that is highly visible during placement but
becomes transparent during patient recovery
• Resorbable barrier membrane for faster and lower-cost
guided bone regeneration in periodontal applications
• Surgically implantable prosthesis for the prevention of
tracheobronchial distortion after lobar lung resection
Upstream Entrepreneurship
Aspiring entrepreneurs in Southwestern Pennsylvania’s
Mon Valley—distressed former steel towns along the
Monongahela River upstream from Pittsburgh—will be
receiving a new level of entrepreneurial education and support
from the University of Pittsburgh.
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
8
This will happen thanks to a new federally funded initiative
launched by Pitt’s Urban and Regional Research program
within the University Center for Social and Urban Research
in partnership with the Innovation Institute’s Institute for
Entrepreneurial Excellence (IEE). The U.S. Department of
Commerce’s Economic Development Administration awarded
the Urban and Regional Research program a two-year
$300,000 grant, which is being matched by the University, to
provide educational programming and business consultation
aimed at helping residents there start new small businesses.
As part of this initiative, IEE consultants will provide the
education and consultation, and the Urban and Regional
Research program will evaluate the effectiveness of such
programs in distressed areas via predetermined metrics, focus
groups, and surveys of Mon Valley residents.
“The Advancing Entrepreneurship in the Mon Valley Region
Initiative takes business professionals from Pitt and places them
within the Mon Valley community, where their experience
and expertise can do good for the people of Southwestern
Pennsylvania,” says Rhonda Carson Leach, director of the IEE’s
Urban Entrepreneurship program. Adds Sabina Deitrick, the
initiative’s principal investigator and codirector of Pitt’s Urban
and Regional Research program: “The mission of this initiative
is to create a pathway for potential small business owners in the
Mon Valley to open and develop pro?table enterprises within
their communities and link those enterprises to public and
private partnerships throughout Southwestern Pennsylvania.”
Alzheimer’s and the FDA
In ?scal year 2014, a breakthrough technology for diagnosing
early stage Alzheimer’s disease, developed at Pitt by psychiatry
professor William Klunk and radiology professor Chester
Mathis, received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval
and now is available commercially.
The technology, originally known as Pittsburgh Compound B,
is licensed to GE Healthcare, which completed the develop-
ment and clinical testing of the diagnostic agent and now
is marketing it under the name Vizamyl
™
.
The compound is a radioactive diagnostic Positron Emission
Tomography imaging agent that helps measure beta amyloid
neuritic plaque density in adult patients with cognitive
impairment. It’s the only FDA-approved imaging tracer that
provides visual interpretation of color images rather than
black-and-white images.
Dodging Diabetes
Those across the country at risk of type 2 diabetes are
receiving more than an ounce of prevention these days,
thanks to a program developed by epidemiology professor
M. Kaye Kramer and a team of researchers at the University
of Pittsburgh Diabetes Prevention Support Center.
Kramer is the director of the center, which resides in the
Graduate School of Public Health.
The program, called Group Lifestyle Balance™ (GLB), pro-
motes the idea that small changes in lifestyle, such as healthy
eating and more physical activity, could lower the chances of
developing the disease for high-risk individuals. The program
is designed to help users lose 7 percent of their weight through
healthy eating and maintain at least 150 minutes of moderate
intense physical activity weekly.
So far, the program has been adopted across the country by
more than 100 hospitals, medical foundations, community
centers, churches, military bases, and other locations with
help from the Innovation Institute’s Of?ce of Technology
Management (OTM). It also has been licensed through
OTM to a number of for-pro?t commercial partners. The
evidence-based GLB was adapted from the Diabetes Prevention
Program, a national NIH-funded study that was published
in the February 7, 2002, edition of the New England Journal
of Medicine.
Rejection Test, Approved
Pitt-based startup Plexision, Inc., received a commercial boost
this past year when it was awarded approval from the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration to market a laboratory blood
test called Pleximmune.
The blood test, developed originally by Pitt surgery professor
Rakesh Sindhi and his research team, is designed to aid in
the prediction of the risk of rejection for an organ transplant,
known as acute cellular rejection, in patients under 21 years
old who have undergone liver or small-bowel transplants.
PET scans of a patient with mild
Alzheimer’s disease on the left
and similar PET scans from a
healthy elderly person (Control)
with no memory impairment
on the right. The images were
obtained by using Pittsburgh
Compound-B (PiB).
New Web Portal
Whether you’re a Pitt Innovator, entrepreneurial
student, local business owner, mentor, investor, or a
company looking for available innovations to license,
you can gain quick access to educational information,
events calendars, news, contacts, and a searchable
database of innovations via the Innovation Institute’s
new Web site. Check it out.
INNOVATION.PITT.EDU
2014 Annual Report
9
Interns, Interns, Interns
LEVERAGING ENTREPRENEURIAL CONNECTIONS
The Innovation Institute’s Institute for Entrepreneurial
Excellence (IEE), in partnership with Pitt Student Affairs, has
launched a new internship program that will match Pitt students
with many of the thousands of local companies that receive
education, networking, and entrepreneurial assistance from IEE.
IEE staff members already are beginning to work with the
Of?ce of Career Development and Placement Assistance to
facilitate the match making, which also includes connections to
a number of outside economic development partners.
“I believe that this program will positively impact the lives of
even more students and at the same time signi?cantly support
Pittsburgh’s economies by keeping more of our graduates
employed here at local companies made even more dynamic
because of IEE’s collaborative efforts,” says Kathy Humphrey,
vice provost and dean of students at Pitt.
Adds Robert Stein, interim director of IEE, “As part of Pitt’s
Innovation Institute, we now have the resources of the entire
University at our ?ngertips and are doing more than ever to
leverage our organization to bene?t the University’s overall
economic impact.”
Coulter Collaborations:
Six New Technologies Funded
Research collaborators for six new technology-development
projects earned the attention of—and $100,000 in funding
each from—the Wallace H. Coulter Translational Research
Partners II Program in 2014.
This ?ve-year competitive grant program, led by the Swanson
School of Engineering’s bioengineering department, works to
promote and facilitate innovation development collaborations
between health sciences clinicians and bioengineering research-
ers to solve unmet clinical problems. Also contributing to this
round of funding was the Clinical and Translational Science
Institute, with an additional $100,000 in funding collectively
for the six projects.
The goal for these projects: advanced commercial development
that positions the innovations for potential startup company
consideration. The following projects received funding during
the latest round:
Briefs continued
BODYEXPLORER
This is a next-generation simulation system for training
health care providers that combines an intuitive user interface
with augmented-reality visualization, and provides real-time
feedback. Collaborators include bioengineering professor
Joseph Samosky and nursing professor John O’Donnell.
INTERACTION
Collaborators Kevin Bell, a bioengineering professor, and James
Irrgang, an orthopaedic surgery professor, are developing a new
telerehabilitation solution to promote exercise adherence for
patients who underwent total knee replacement surgery. The
system includes a wearable, portable, motion-capture device
and a Web-based computer software application for managing
and communicating joint function data to a remote therapist.
E3 THERAPEUTICS
This potential startup is based on the development of a new
platform class of anti-in?ammatory compounds aimed at
treating bronchitis and other diseases with fewer side effects
than current treatments. The compounds, which target the
FBXO3 protein, are being developed by bioengineering
professor William Chen and Rama Mallampalli, a professor
of pulmonary, allergy, and critical care medicine.
PRO-TECT™
Bioengineering professor David Brienza and surgeon Alan
Murdock have come together to develop a novel mattress
overlay for hospital intensive care unit (ICU) beds that
incorporates targeted cooling of vulnerable soft tissue near
bony prominences of the sacral area. Its purpose is to mitigate
or prevent costly sacral pressure ulcers on ICU patients.
RESMAG
Resorbable metal screws and novel plates made with a pro-
prietary alloy for repairing broken bones serve as the basis of
this Coulter project. These technologies—designed to replace
non-degrading metals such as titanium and stainless steel,
which can create surgical complications—are being developed
by bioengineering professor Prashant Kumta and Charles Sfeir,
associate dean of research in the School of Dental Medicine
and director of the Center for Craniofacial Regeneration.
SHARP
This acronym, which stands for System for Hospital Adaptive
Readmission Prevention, represents a new decision-support
system aimed at reducing hospital readmission rates by provid-
ing real-time risk estimates and personalized patient education.
The system is being developed by bioengineering professor
Rich Tsui and pediatrics professor Andrew Urbach.
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
10
Engaging Innovators and Entrepreneurs
While a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship does
require great ideas, it always has to begin and end with great
people. That’s why the Innovation Institute and its staff
members continue to put the people ?rst, whether they are Pitt
Innovators, student entrepreneurs, or local business owners.
As a service-oriented Pitt organization, Institute staff members
serve as educators and facilitators of commercialization
processes, educational programs, interactive opportunities,
business consulting, competitions and celebrations—all aimed
at helping the people of Pitt and Pittsburgh embrace a culture
driven by innovation and entrepreneurship.
This past year, with the convergence of the Of?ce of
Technology Management (OTM), Of?ce of Enterprise
Development (OED), and Institute for Entrepreneurial
Excellence (IEE) into the new Innovation Institute, the
Institute has created considerable momentum when it comes
to getting people involved.
Pitt Innovator Participants: Let’s start with innovation
commercialization. While Pitt Innovators submitted 274
invention disclosures for commercial consideration in ?scal
year 2014, more than 500 innovators actually participated in
the development of those ideas. That record number includes
165 students who contributed to such efforts. Moreover, of the
104 innovators whose innovations were licensed or optioned
outside of the University in ?scal year 2014, 15 were students.
The previous year’s innovators were honored at the annual
Celebration of Innovation, with those whose innovations
were licensed/optioned earning Pitt Innovator Awards. The
celebration last November also marked the of?cial launching
of the Institute.
Education: The Institute this past year offered its introductory
Academic Entrepreneurship course and two different sections
of its 14-week Benchtop to Bedside: What Every Scientist
Needs to Know course to faculty, staff, and students. All told,
nearly 100 people attended the three Institute-based courses.
Pitt Ventures Activities: In January 2014, as part of its startup
development activities, the Institute’s OED launched the Pitt
Ventures Gear program, which takes innovation development
teams through customer discovery, business model
development, and, ultimately, company formation.
Since it was launched, 22 teams—more
than 100 people and half of them students—entered the
process. The result so far: one new company formed, one
license in term sheet discussions, three innovations in exclusive
option negotiations, and $925,000 in additional nonfederal
funding attained.
OED also worked with 30 Pitt Innovators who participated in
the University’s annual Science Technology Showcase event.
Innovators were assigned business mentors and then produced
posters that were displayed at the reception. At least 250
people attended that campus event.
Big Idea, Wells, and Other
Competitions: As the
Institute learned this past
year, student entrepreneurs
are alive and well at
Pitt—and looking for
opportunities to compete.
The Randall Family
Big Idea Competition,
which offered $100,000
in prizes, attracted
125 students across
campus representing 12
different Pitt schools.
The competition included a Startup Weekend (attended by 120
students), elevator pitch sessions, and a startup bootcamp, and
led up to a ?nal awards program that attracted an estimated
300 attendees.
Meanwhile, the Michael G. Wells Student Health Care
Entrepreneurship Competition last year attracted 19 student
innovators, who participated in six teams. The winner received
$10,000. The Institute also supported the Pitt Innovation
Challenge, hosted by the Clinical Translational and Science
Institute. In the end, three innovator teams each won $100,000
in federal grant funding to develop their innovations.
Community: The Institute’s IEE continues to grow its mem-
bership of regional companies and their leadership. This past
year, its membership grew to 195 companies and 406 business
leaders from those companies. The membership organization
provides regular opportunities for entrepreneurial education,
training, and networking. IEE’s Entrepreneurial Fellows
Center program, meanwhile, played host last year to 36 local
entrepreneurs. The IEE also counseled 646 business
owners about growth issues and assisted 55 entre-
preneurs in starting or buying new businesses.
Rory Cooper, Distinguished Professor and chair
of the Department of Rehabilitation Science and
Technology (second from right) is presented with
the Pitt Innovator Award by Chancellor Emeritus
Mark A. Nordenberg (far right), Senior Vice
Chancellor for the Health Sciences and John
and Gertrude Petersen Dean of the School of
Medicine Arthur S. Levine (second from left),
and Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor
Patricia E. Beeson (far left).
2014 Annual Report
11
or decades, scientists have relied on the 1930s-
era technology of the phase microscope to look
at cells. Despite its extremely high sensitivity,
though, the instrument is not able to accurately
quantify the subtle changes on the nanoscale.
Moreover, the high sensitivity creates a wide array of variables
that can interfere with the image itself, such as outside noise,
vibrations, or the way the sample was prepared. Yang Liu, an
associate professor of bioengineering and medicine at the
University of Pittsburgh, and collaborator Randall Brand, a
professor of medicine, saw that as a problem they could solve.
Intrigued by the potentially high upside of using phase
microscopy, in 2009, they devised an optical system that
eliminates the variables and offers an image that maps
the architecture of the cell in three dimensions and can be
measured at the nanoscale. Their new system now allows
users to observe the tiniest changes of the architecture of
cell nuclei in biopsy slides and then predict earlier and with
far greater accuracy which cell changes likely are cancerous.
Because early diagnosis often can mean the difference
between life and death, the advantages of their system could
prove to be extraordinary.
But Liu says they knew they would need extensive commer-
cialization guidance to move their idea forward.
NanoVision
Bioengineering/medicine professor
Yang Liu and medicine professor
Randall Brand, with support from the
Wallace H. Coulter Foundation, the
Innovation Institute Pitt Ventures
program, and a committed executive
in residence, see a big future for the
startup commercializing their new
cancer-detecting microscope system.
“I was just a university professor, and I was fairly new here at
the time,” Liu says. “I really didn’t know who we should talk to.”
They didn’t have to go far for help. Liu and Brand found that
they could leverage a number of commercialization programs
at Pitt along the way. Chief among them were the Coulter
Translational Research Partners II Program in the bioengi-
neering department, which provided education, guidance, and
funding; the Of?ce of Technology Management (OTM), which
provided commercialization support; the Of?ce of Enterprise
Development (OED)’s Pitt Ventures program, which provided
the Coulter Program’s education component and startup
development support; and OED’s executive in residence (EIR)
program, which connected Liu and Brand with EIR Michael
Lang, a serial entrepreneur with experience in medical devices.
The combined effort this past year led to the launching of Pitt
spin-off NanoVision Diagnostics, Inc. Running the Pittsburgh-
based company is Lang, who spent two and a half years at
the OTM/OED looking for the right venture to launch. He says
he was impressed with the technology as well as with the
grant funding and clinical trial that Liu and Brand already
had started in support of their idea.
“I’ve been around the block a lot, and I’ve seen a lot in the
health care world,” Lang says. “What they were doing was
unique. It allows us to understand what’s going on in the
DNA in the cell nucleus.”
F
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
12
Lang says that he began to collaborate with Liu and Brand
in 2011 on potential business opportunities for their system.
As part of the process, Lang analyzed the cost of the
equipment and compared the system’s ?edgling business
model to the rest of the market. They concluded that the
best course of action was to create a new company.
Lang started NanoVision Diagnostics in late 2013, licensed
the technology from Pitt, and then left the University to
serve as the startup’s CEO. His startup team continues
to forge ahead. To date, the team has raised investment
capital, operationalized the company, and built a modi?ed
version of the original system to run higher volumes of
diagnostic tests for commercial applications. They currently
are validating the modi?ed device’s results and are
launching large-scale clinical studies with other institutions
as a basis for taking the system to market.
Because of her status as a university professor, Liu simply
consults for the company. But the satisfaction she has
realized as a Pitt Innovator is palpable.
“It’s your baby, and you want it to do well,” she says. “It’s
actually a lot of extra work from my standpoint, but we want
our technology to get to the patient. You feel what you do
is more valuable.”
Liu and Brand’s new system now
allows users to observe the tiniest
changes of the architecture of cell
nuclei in biopsy slides and then
predict earlier and with far greater
accuracy which cell changes are
likely cancerous. Because early
diagnosis often can mean the
difference between life and death,
the advantages of her system could
prove to be extraordinary.
2014 Annual Report
13
“We have a lot of good
momentum from an
idea standpoint. The
vision’s there, and
the technology is
certainly capable of
being developed.”
s Eric Sinagra pushed a three-wheeled cart
roughly resembling a baby stroller along
the sidewalks of Washington, D.C., recently,
he and his development team knew they
would be smoothing the path—at least
?guratively—for wheelchair users in the
future to ?nd better access through that city and beyond.
Known as PathMeT, the cart is a pathway measurement
tool developed by Sinagra while he was a student in the
University of Pittsburgh School of Health and Rehabilitation
Sciences along with a student team that included Ian
McIntyre; Tianyang Chen; Jonathan Duvall; and Sinagra’s
faculty advisor, Jonathan Pearlman, associate director
of engineering at Pitt’s Human Engineering Research
Laboratories, which is a partnership between Pitt, VA
Pittsburgh Healthcare System, and UPMC. The device
pro?les surfaces, collecting data about the ground it covers
with pictures and a GPS system.
PathMeT is the basis of a new startup company called
PathVu. The company, according to its Web site, pathvu.com,
has positioned itself as “the leading provider of technology
and service that ensure compliance with standards to
support accessibility, infrastructure quality, and asset
management.” Its target customers include contractors,
city planners, and municipal public works departments.
Sinagra, who graduated from Pitt in April 2014 with a
master’s degree in rehabilitation science and technology,
has joined the startup
as its president and
chief technology of?cer.
The other student team
members likewise
have joined.
The company’s chief
executive of?cer is
Chip Hanlon, who
began working with the
development team as
an executive in
residence with the
Innovation Institute’s
Of?ce of Enterprise Development (OED). He met the
development team as the students were participating
in OED’s educational First Gear program, part of Pitt Ventures.
Sinagra managed the development of PathMeT as his
master’s thesis project. His interest in the topic originated
with his older brother, who has spinal muscular atrophy and
uses a power wheelchair.
In the course of researching the commercial need for
PathMeT, Sinagra noted two legal cases related to
A Path to Success
wheelchair inaccessibility in Los
Angeles, Calif., that resulted in
multimillion-dollar settlements for the
plaintiffs. A device like his might have
helped the likes of Los Angeles to
better assess sidewalk conditions and
avoid costly lawsuits, he contends.
“If the city knows about an inacces-
sible sidewalk, the city ultimately is
partially liable,” he says, but he adds: “How do you ?x your
sidewalks unless you know what their current status is?”
But developing his device proved to be only the ?rst
challenge. Next was ?guring out how to take it to market. So
he took the Innovation Institute’s Academic Entrepreneurship
course, where he learned “a little bit of everything,” he says.
“It was a very good starting point,” Sinagra says, “because
it gave me an overview of what I needed to look at and
how I needed to start looking at things from the patent
standpoint, from the law standpoint, but also understanding
the value proposition and how I articulate that.”
Sinagra and his team also competed in the Innovation
Institute’s 2014 Randall Family Big Idea Competition—and
won $20,000 along with three other student innovation
development teams.
Those efforts have since positioned PathVu well enough
to be accepted into the state-funded Innovation Works
AlphaLab Gear accelerator program. Pearlman, the faculty
advisor and codeveloper, says that assistance from the
Innovation Institute was crucial in taking PathMeT to market.
To help him better understand, he took the Institute’s From
Benchtop to Bedside: What Every Scientist Needs to Know
course, which he says is “a really great primer on how to
think about translating what you’re doing in the lab into
industry. … Being in research is all very entrepreneurial,
but the language is different.”
Sinagra agrees. “We started off thinking we were just going
to sell these devices, and as we talked with these compa-
nies and as we talked with our mentors, we quickly realized
it’s a service/data model,” Sinagra says. “It’s the information
that really becomes important.”
In the summer of 2014, the company won its ?rst major
project: collecting more than 100 miles’ worth of sidewalk
data throughout Washington, D.C.
“We have a lot of good momentum from an idea
standpoint,” says Pearlman. “The vision’s there, and the
technology is certainly capable of being developed.”
A
Eric Sinagra
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
14
This Pitt student team, led by Eric Sinagra
and faculty advisor Jonathan Pearlman,
has created a device and company
to measure the condition and
accessibility of city sidewalks.
Left to right: Jonathan Pearlman,
Ian McIntyre, and Jonathan Duvall
Lymph Node Livers
Pathology professor Eric Lagasse has developed
a way to grow mini organs with liver
function using lymph nodes.
R
oughly 100,000 people in the United
States will be hospitalized each year with
serious liver disease, says Pitt Innovator
Eric Lagasse. But with just 6,000 organs
typically available, the chances of receiving
a transplant are slim.
Lagasse, an associate professor of pathology with a lab
at Pitt’s McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine,
believes he has found a way to circumvent those odds.
He is researching a promising new method for using
lymph nodes to grow what could be considered tiny
functioning livers that pick up the functions that are lost
when a patient’s native liver no longer can perform. Since
publishing his ?rst paper on the topic in 2011, he has
been building slowly upon more complex animal models
to demonstrate the ef?cacy of his idea.
“What we have done here is basically discover that the
lymph node is also a great site for normal cells to grow and
expand,” he explains.
It began as what he calls “sort of this crazy idea”:
transplanting liver cells into mice with liver disease in
places other than the liver to see if liver regeneration
would occur. Lagasse was surprised to ?nd that the
transplanted cells migrated to their lymph nodes, where
the cells survived and developed into functioning mini
livers. When he considered the phenomenon, he says it
made sense to him: lymph nodes function as the body’s
bioreactor for infection-?ghting T cells. When you get a
virus, the nodes—roughly 500 of which exist in the human
body—swell because they are expanding the T cells to
return to the infection and kill the virus.
Lagasse says he has been able to grow more than 20 small
livers which together function at roughly 75 percent of the
capacity of the native liver, thereby picking up the functions
that the original organ has stopped performing. Building
on some encouraging
initial data, Lagasse
now is poised to publish
research conducted on
larger animal models
in hopes of eventually
moving toward clinical
trials in humans.
A veteran of private
industry, Lagasse says
that he came to Pitt
in 2004 to continue
working on academic questions that were less interesting
to companies focused on products. Because his research
focuses on the liver, he was particularly attracted to Pitt,
which he considers “probably the best place for studying
liver biology,” because of the University’s strong history
of transplantation and cell biology.
He is hoping to earn private investment for additional
research, with an eye toward human trials, by working with
the Innovation Institute’s Of?ce of Technology Management
to negotiate a license for the liver innovation with an
outside investor.
“This is quite an out-of-the-box idea,” he acknowledges,
but he adds that researchers working in the liver transplant
?eld have been widely supportive.
“All the elements are there,” he says. “The whole thing is
really exciting. Optimistically, in a few years, we may be
able to move this into patients and change the lives of
a lot of people.”
“All the elements are
there. The whole
thing is really exciting.
Optimistically, in a
few years, we may
be able to move this
into patients and
change the lives of
a lot of people.”
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
16
T
Students can learn
to write better with
the help of the right
algorithm-driven
peer review.
he art of writing well often is perceived as intuitive,
while the art of evaluation seems inherently
subjective. But a new Pitt spinoff company built
around computer software developed by psychology
professor Christian Schunn is making a bold
statement: that students can learn to write better with the
help of the right algorithm-driven peer review.
Local serial entrepreneur and investor Mark Limbach, with
additional private investment support, last year launched
Panther Learning Systems, Inc., licensing Schunn’s inno-
vation from Pitt as the basis of the startup. The computer
software system, called Peerceptiv, evolved from a system
?rst created in 2002 by Schunn, who conducts research as
part of Pitt’s Learning Research and Development Center, to
test a fundamental theory.
“Peer review would
be much better if
students had an
incentive to treat it
seriously,” he says,
adding, “and it
didn’t require heavy
instructor oversight.”
Peerceptiv begins with a systematic peer review of papers
by classmates but then also requires authors to rate their
reviewers on how helpful their comments are. The system
then manages the reviews, basic score calculations, and the
curving of scores to produce useful grades for the instructor
and valuable feedback for the students.
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
18
Promising Peer Review
The Learning Research and Development
Center’s Christian Schunn has elevated the
virtues of student peer review to improve
writing skills, and a local startup is
taking his innovation to market.
In the early days of his development efforts, Schunn says
he initially tested his software program in a few classes
before making it publicly available, at which point its usage
proliferated. Schunn upgraded his system in 2009, and
the corresponding uptick in usage prompted him to stop
advertising because he simply didn’t have the time or
resources on his own to provide effective customer support.
“For me, it was a research fun space,” he explains, but
he didn’t see such ongoing support as part of his job as
a professor. Still, he did decide one day to participate in a
poster reception hosted by the Innovation Institute’s Of?ces
of Technology Management and Enterprise Development.
The point of the reception was to pitch ideas to potential
investors. That’s where he ?rst met Limbach, who attended
the session with investor Bill Rooney.
“After we saw Chris’ presentation, we were very
impressed,” Limbach says, noting that Schunn managed
to build a loyal following for his academic project without
any real sales effort or market development. The system
seemed ripe for commercialization, particularly in light of
seeming education trends toward larger classes and less
funding, making the job of teaching critical thinking skills
even more challenging for instructors.
Limbach says a discussion with a teacher from
Pittsburgh’s City Charter High School sealed the deal
for him. The teacher reported a whopping 98 percent
pro?ciency rating for his students on the state’s standard-
ized test—unheard of for an urban charter school—after
using Schunn’s software.
“From that point forward, it’s just been a steady
progression,” Limbach says. He now serves as Panther
Learning Systems’ chief executive of?cer; Schunn is its
director of technology, and Rooney serves as the chief
?nancial of?cer.
The company now is focusing on multiplatform integration
and making the interface simpler, easier, and more ele-
gant. Limbach also sees market potential in the corporate
world, where unbiased feedback could be of value.
For his part, Schunn is viewing the collaboration as a
marathon, not a sprint.
“You have to pace yourself accordingly—?gure out what’s
the most important piece of what you want to keep going
and have regular face-to-face time with the people who
will be in the company,” he says. “I found that to be really
quite helpful.”
Christian Schunn, left, and CEO Mark Limbach
2014 Annual Report
19
W
Wound-healing Vision
“Unless it gets
commercialized, it’s
just an interesting ?nd
in the laboratory. It’s
so important that this
sort of discovery
gets from the lab to
a commercialized
product if you want
it to actually
help people.”
A research team from pathology,
nursing and ophthalmology is
developing a peptide to improve
the healing process for glaucoma
surgery patients.
hat do you get when you combine the
wound-healing research of pathology and
nursing professors at Pitt with knowledge
from the insightful chair of the Department
of Ophthalmology and his team? You wind
up with a vision to develop a novel molecule
that helps glaucoma surgery patients to recover more
completely, saving their eyesight in the process.
Glaucoma, the second-leading cause of blindness in the
United States, affects about 2 percent of the population
over the age of 40. The condition often requires surgery,
but scarring sometimes can cause the procedure to fail,
according to Joel Schuman, chair of Pitt’s Department
of Ophthalmology, Eye & Ear Foundation Professor, and
director of the UPMC Eye Center. An agent that would allow
doctors to better regulate wound healing at the surgical site
could have tremendous impact, he notes.
Enter the research team of Alan Wells,
Thomas J. Gill III Professor of Pathology,
who collaborated with Cecelia Yates-
Binder, then a postdoctoral fellow (and
now an assistant professor in the School
of Nursing’s Department of Health
Promotion and Development), on a
project involving wound healing. They
were studying the body’s post-injury
signal that shuts off a period of rapid
growth and repair to return the wound
site to a quiet phase after an injury.
Their research identi?ed peptide
fragments that are responsible for this
form of vascular regression. Thinking it
might help diabetic patients—for whom
abnormal vascular growth is a problem,
especially in the eye—they brought their
research to Schuman, “who knows more
about the eye than even he cares to
know about,” Wells jokes.
Schuman, whose research team also includes Ian Conner,
an assistant professor of ophthalmology, says that he saw
great potential for using their peptide fragments to help
glaucoma patients. Glaucoma causes an increase in eye
pressure from a buildup of ?uid in the eyeball. To release
that pressure, surgeons will drill a hole in the eyeball, but
the surgery can leave scars that complicate recovery. In
tests on animal models, the team’s peptide both maintained
the surgical opening, built to lower eye pressure, and
caused a lining of cells at the front of the eye to grow in
larger numbers, helping to maintain the eye’s integrity and
health after surgery.
It also might serve as a treatment for dry eye, says Schuman.
“We’re hopeful that the agent will be effective there as well
as in the glaucoma surgery,” says Schuman, who describes
the new molecule as a potentially important breakthrough
for dry eye.
The team found help in commercializing its idea through
the Innovation Institute’s Of?ce of Technology Management
(OTM), which assisted with invention disclosures and
in ?ling patent applications. OTM also shepherded
the team through the process of negotiating with eye
care companies.
“They were very good in helping us to understand the
business aspects of how the process works in going from
discovery to the laboratory to an actual product,” says
Schuman, who was involved in the invention of another
device many years ago.
Wells agrees with Schuman. “At least three of us have
had experience with dealing with outside companies and
have been consulted or been involved in setting up outside
biotech, but this is not our arena,” Wells says. “It’s not the
best use of our expertise, whereas OTM has people who
have been there and done that, and they have the expertise
for guidance.”
The team hopes to ?nd the best pathway toward bringing
the molecule into a clinical trial, an important step on the
road to getting it to patients.
“Unless it gets commercialized, it’s just an interesting ?nd
in the laboratory,” says Schuman. “It’s so important that
this sort of discovery gets from the lab to a commercialized
product if you want it to actually help people.”
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
20
Left to right: Alan Wells, Joel Schuman,
and Cecelia Yates-Binder
2014 Annual Report
21
E
That was the beginning of E Properties and Development,
a company that builds and renovates structures in the
Pittsburgh neighborhoods of Lawrenceville, Gar?eld, and
Friendship, including the distinctive Croghan’s Edge devel-
opment. In fact, E Properties and Development received a
design award from the American Institute of Architects in
2012 for the innovative design of this development, which
includes four modular homes on a single property.
Many entrepreneurs, Onwugbenu says, view participation
in a program to improve management skills as time
they can’t afford to spare. But he doesn’t see it that way.
Once enrolled in the yearlong Entrepreneurial Fellows
Center program, he says he quickly recognized it as time
well invested.
“The program forced
me to step back, look
at my business, and
to be honest with
myself. I asked, ‘What
am I doing right
and wrong?’ All of
the sessions were
valuable because they
focused on practical
applications.”
meka Onwugbenu knows a thing or two about
building. Whether building a new life in the United
States, building acclaimed educational credentials,
or building a new business, Onwugbenu radiates
a passion and entrepreneurial spirit that exempli?es
the American dream.
Onwugbenu, a graduate of the Entrepreneurial Fellows
Center program at the Institute for Entrepreneurial
Excellence, which is part of the University of Pittsburgh
Innovation Institute, is the founder
and president of his own company,
E Properties and Development,
in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville
neighborhood.
Growing up in Nigeria as one of eight
siblings, he was a member of the
Igbo ethnic group long known for its
entrepreneurship. Onwugbenu says he
?rst learned about free enterprise as a
young boy by selling eggs from a pair
of chickens his grandmother gave him.
When he ?rst came to the United States
to study engineering at Pennsylvania
State University, he continued his
entrepreneurial endeavors via buying
and selling on Craigslist and eBay.
Onwugbenu graduated in 2006 and
made his way to Pittsburgh to serve
as a facilities and products engineer
for MEDRAD, a medical device
manufacturer. While there, he enrolled in Carnegie Mellon
University’s MBA program and took his ?rst steps into the
world of real estate development. Despite a very busy
schedule, Onwugbenu, who says he always had an interest
in the real estate industry, used the recession at the time
as an opportunity to buy an undervalued house and, with
the help of a hired crew, to renovate it.
Building Value and Balance
Emeka Onwugbenu, owner of E Properties and
Development in Pittsburgh, honed his entrepreneurial
acumen as a member of the Institute for
Entrepreneurial Excellence’s Entrepreneurial
Fellows Center program.
Copyright©, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 2014, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
22
“The program forced me to step back, look at my business,
and to be honest with myself,” Onwugbenu says. “I asked,
‘What am I doing right and wrong?’ All of the sessions were
valuable because they focused on practical applications.”
The Entrepreneurial Fellows Center program is a dynamic
educational experience designed to provide business
leaders with direction, knowledge, and connections to
take their businesses to the next growth level. Participants
bene?t from custom-designed program materials, peer
learning and sharing, and custom-matched mentoring.
Onwugbenu had the highest praise for the two mentors with
whom he was matched as part of the curriculum, one from
the construction industry and the other from development
and ?nance.
“The contributions made by my mentors were priceless,”
says Onwugbenu. “You can’t pay for that.”
Onwugbenu had two major goals he wanted to achieve
through the program. First, he wanted to develop a deeper
understanding of how to manage ?nancial growth. Second,
he wanted to develop a better method of choosing which
properties to purchase. The program gave him applicable
tools to accomplish both of these goals, and his classmates,
while from different ?elds, provided valuable insight as well.
“The program brought me a sense of balance,” says
Onwugbenu. “It was an investment in myself and my
business that will pay dividends for years to come.”
2014 Annual Report
23
Engineering professor
Buddy Clark transformed
his passion for baseball
into a viable motion
analytics device company
for coaches and players.
Left to right: Jeffrey Schuldt, C.J. Handron,
and William “Buddy” Clark
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
24
T
he swing of a baseball bat takes 0.2 seconds
to complete, making any critique by the
human eye dif?cult. So coaches, recruiters,
and players alike sometimes spend
countless hours watching and rewatching
?lm just to assess the quality of one swing.
Mechanical engineering and materials science professor
William “Buddy” Clark, who admits to being a baseball
fanatic, couldn’t help but see this as just another innovation
challenge. And he came out swinging.
His solution, which has become the basis for a new local
startup venture called Diamond Kinetics, Inc., is a motion
analytics-based device and suite of software applications
which the company now calls SwingTracker. The device
features a number of small sensors that capture precise
motion data in real time and send the information to a
paired mobile device, Clark says. He developed the product
in collaboration with Noel Perkins, a mechanical engineer-
ing professor from the University of Michigan.
SwingTracker allows users to compare swing metrics
against other players by age and skill level and let them
see their own swing and motion data together through
a 3-D viewer and video function.
Clark at the same time developed what he calls BatFitter,
which helps coaches and players to determine the optimal
bat size for the players.
“The question of optimal bat size turned out to be an
interesting challenge that allowed me to combine my
passion for baseball with my background in dynamic
systems and measurements,” Clark says. “I developed a
method for determining the ideal bat for players based on
their individual abilities. Initially, the method focused only
on speci?c parameters of the swing, but that evolved into
the use of inertial sensors that could capture the complete
path of the swing—every detail of the bat’s motion—which
provides a huge amount of data for coaches and players
that’s never been available before.”
So began Clark’s entrepreneurial journey, and soon the
issue was raised of how Clark would get his products to
market. So he turned to the University of Pittsburgh Institute
for Entrepreneurial Excellence (IEE), which is part of the
Innovation Institute, for help. He worked closely with IEE’s
PantherlabWorks program, which assists entrepreneurs in
technology-based startup development, and its director
at the time, C.J. Handron.
“I understood the technology but was in the dark about
what needed to be done on the business side,” Clark, a
proli?c Pitt Innovator, admits. “Visiting IEE was probably the
best decision I made in the early days of the company. They
provided a tremendous amount of help in developing the
business model, planning for fundrais-
ing, and generally getting the company
from concept to reality.”
Says Handron of the relationship, which
extended beyond simply a professional
consulting role, “I’m a baseball guy
through and through. I know how to
approach the target market because
I am the target market.”
In fact, Handron found himself so
impassioned by the business opportu-
nity that he eventually decided to take
on the role of CEO of Diamond Kinetics
full time and left IEE.
“We worked together for almost a
year at IEE before I made the decision
to join the company full time as CEO
to build out the infrastructure from a
business perspective,” Handron says. “Through my work
at IEE, I developed a strong network within the early stage
technology community, which certainly has been valuable
as we work to raise capital and add team members.”
Diamond Kinetics and its products since have been featured
in Sports Illustrated, on the Web site Mashable, and at
the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. It also found
a spot on the Pittsburgh Business Times’ “20 Companies
to Watch in 2014” list.
Moreover, Handron says, additional applications and uses
of the technology in these sports are in development, which
should come as no surprise. “Diamond Kinetics remains
focused on driving a fundamental change in baseball and
softball training and performance.”
“Through my work
at IEE, I developed
a strong network
within the early-
stage technology
community, which
certainly has been
valuable as we work to
raise capital and
add team members.”
Swinging for the Fences
P
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t
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:
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i
d
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y
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.
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2014 Annual Report
25
QuitNinja
A
“The PInCh competition
is well designed and
provides a fantastic
opportunity for Pitt
and its community
of researchers. The
course prepared me
for the competition by
teaching me invaluable
entrepreneurial skills
and how to effectively
pitch an idea.”
s creatures of habit, people easily fall into patterns
of behavior. This certainly rings true for those trying
to quit smoking, who face triggers throughout the
day that make them want to light up. If only those
smokers could have an encouraging reminder to not
smoke when the impulse to do so presents itself,
they might be more successful in quitting.
Ellen Beckjord, an assistant professor of psychiatry and of
clinical and translational science, and her research team,
including technology partner Vignet Corporation, have, in
fact, developed a unique mobile app for
that. She calls their smoking cessation
support system QuitNinja.
Beckjord says she has found in her
work as a psychologist that many
patients want to stop unhealthy behav-
iors such as smoking, but because
direct behavior reinforcements are not
available in real time—at the moment
when the patients often need them
the most, they fail in their attempts to
change their behavior.
QuitNinja is a context-aware smart-
phone application focused on improv-
ing self-regulation in the context of
smoking cessation, Beckjord explains.
It uses evidence-based, ecological
momentary assessment protocols to
gather data in real time from smokers
during a quit attempt and then delivers
context-appropriate messages and
images to help them stay motivated to
resist the urge to smoke.
This ability to provide evidence-based real-time interven-
tion, she says, is what differentiates QuitNinja from other
smoking cessation and health behavior change apps.
“Face-to-face counseling can’t reach people when they
really need it,” Beckjord says. “A mobile platform is the
game changer that can extend the reach. While other apps
provide some real-time intervention delivery, QuitNinja
provides intervention at the right time.”
Her team’s development is paying off, especially on
campus. In spring 2014, Beckjord and her team entered
QuitNinja in the ?rst-ever Pitt Innovation Challenge (PInCh),
which was hosted by Pitt’s Clinical and Translational
Science Institute in collaboration with the Of?ce of the
Provost and the Innovation Institute. The PInCh competition
focuses on encouraging innovation development and
commercialization around health care solutions. Of the
93 submissions to the competition, QuitNinja was named
one of only three ?rst-place winners.
As a result, the QuitNinja team was awarded a $100,000
grant to further develop the innovation along with a
project manager to help execute a 12-month project
development plan.
“It was humbling to see the other teams’ ideas,” says
Beckjord of her competitors.
Beckjord says she ?rst learned about the PInCh competition
through an educational course offered yearly by the
Innovation Institute titled From Benchtop to Bedside:
What Every Scientist Needs to Know. The course teaches
researchers and clinicians how to transform basic research
discoveries into commercial products and companies for
the bene?t of patients.
Beckjord says she has appreciated the commercialization
education and development opportunities at Pitt.
“The PInCh competition is well designed and provides a
fantastic opportunity for Pitt and its community of research-
ers,” she says. “The course prepared me for the competition
by teaching me invaluable entrepreneurial skills and how
to effectively pitch an idea.”
Moving forward, Beckjord says her team plans to use the
PInCh funds to develop a new version of QuitNinja that
can predict when smokers most likely will encounter urges
to smoke so that interventions can be delivered not only
in real time but preemptively, without users having to
ask for help.
As Beckjord noted in her PInCh pitch: “We don’t want
the QuitNinja user experience to only be ‘I can reach
out to QuitNinja for help.’ We want the user experience
to be ‘QuitNinja knows when I need help and reaches
out to me.’ ”
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
26
Psychiatry professor Ellen Beckjord
and her team have developed a mobile
app that provides real-time—and maybe
preemptive—behavior reinforcement
for smokers trying to quit.
Ellen Beckjord with her
daughter, Louise Burke
Staff Directory
Marc Malandro
Associate Vice Chancellor for
Technology Management and
Commercialization and Interim
Director, Innovation Institute
412-624-8787
Daniel Bates
Strategic Relations
Manager
412-624-4474
Carla Crawford
Executive Assistant to the
Associate Vice Chancellor for
Technology Management and
Commercialization
412-383-7665
Gregory Coticchia
Executive in Residence
412-401-5423
Innovation Institute
Administration
Of?ce of Technology
Management
Babs Carryer
Director of Education
and Outreach
412-624-3172
David Ruppersberger
Director, Joint Economic
Development Initiatives
412-624-3157
Alexander Ducruet
Assistant Director,
Licensing
412-648-2219
Martania Felton
Intellectual Property
Assistant
412-648-2201
Stacey Rizzo
Accountant
412-648-2226
Jason Somma
Intellectual Property
and Licensing
Associate
412-648-2220
Harold Swift
Technology Licensing
Manager
412-648-2236
Lynette Jacobs-Priebe
Accountant
412-624-0219
Kelly Mertz
Financial Analysis and
Reporting Manager
412-383-7139
Andrew Remes
Technology Licensing
Manager
412-624-3134
Janice Panza
Technology Licensing
Associate
412-648-2225
Michelle McAllister
Government Compliance
Administrator
412-648-2203
Lisa Spano
Technology Licensing
Assistant
412-648-2206
Paul Petrovich
Assistant Director,
Technology
Commercialization
412-624-3138
Amy Phillips
Business Development
Manager
412-624-4977
Karen Zellars
Administrative
Coordinator
412-624-3160
Sandy Latini (Not Shown)
Business Manager
412-383-7664
Jenifer Tarasi
Associate Director,
Intellectual Property
412-648-3220
Maria Vanegas
Technology Licensing
Manager
412-648-4004
Carolyn Weber
Technology Licensing
Associate
412-383-7140
Of?ce of Enterprise
Development
Evan Facher
Director, Enterprise
Development
412-624-3152
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
28
Institute for Entrepreneurial
Excellence
Rhonda Carson Leach
Director, Urban
Entrepreneurship Program
412-624-2326
Lauren DeJulio
Account and Grants
Administrator
412-648-1704
Tara Gerek
Events Logistics Manager
412-648-1389
John Dobransky
Business Outreach Coordinator
412-624-2290
Joseph Ciotti
Management Consultant
412-624-0119
Lindsey Gilkes
Senior Management
Consultant
412-624-0189
Robert Stein
Interim Director, IEE
412-648-1540
Victoria Lopez
Consultant
412-648-4183
Katie Robison
Membership Manager
412-624-5678
Allen Jones
Supply Chain Consultant
412-648-1545
Rachel LaMarco
Administrative Assistant
412-648-2005
Catherine Tyson
Senior Management
Consultant
412-648-1546
Raymond Vargo
Director, Small Business
Development Center
412-624-1199
Dione Cahillane (not shown)
Director, Entrepreneurial
Fellows Program
412-648-1066
Angela Wagner (not shown)
Marketing Manager
412-624-5436
Shelley Taylor
Membership Director
412-648-4060
2014 Annual Report
29
Innovation Institute
200 Gardner Steel Conference Center
Thackeray and O’Hara Streets
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Web innovation.pitt.edu
The University of Pittsburgh is an af?rmative action, equal opportunity institution. Published in cooperation with the Department of Communication Services. DCS97083-0914
doc_429830155.pdf
Within this particular detailed file related to 600 local entrepreneurs who received assistance.
@PittInnovates
2014 Annual Report
2
Impact at a Glance
4
Year in Review
8
Briefs
11
Engaging
Innovators and
Entrepreneurs
12
Innovators
28
Staff Directory
We continue to foster
strong partnerships
across campus and
beyond that spark
creative, innovative,
and collaborative
collisions of ideas,
leading to fascinating
new innovations , as
you’ll read in this year’s
annual report.
I
nnovation is alive and thriving at the University of Pittsburgh.
Whether we’re talking about Pitt Innovators who submitted nearly 300 invention
disclosures to the University for commercial consideration in ?scal year 2014, the
more than 125 students who recently competed for $100,000 in prizes in the Randall
Family Big Idea Competition, the dozens on campus who participated in Institute
education programs, the more than 600 local entrepreneurs who received assistance
here, innovation and entrepreneurship are transforming Pitt’s academic culture.
Everyone has played a major role in making the University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
an unequivocal success during its ?rst year.
The University launched the Institute last fall, bringing together its Of?ce of Technology
Management, Of?ce of Enterprise Development, and Institute for Entrepreneurial Excellence
(IEE). Together, we continue to facilitate the translation of research into innovations and
startups that change the world. We also continue to leverage our entrepreneurial expertise
to support Pittsburgh entrepreneurs.
But we also are developing new programs aimed at supporting innovation and entrepre-
neurship among Pitt students. We’re developing a prestartup incubator, experiential learning
opportunities, and a living-learning community, along with Startup Smashes, Popups, and
other activities.
This transition year likewise has included new internal support for this activity, including
new leadership across the organization, new executives in residence, dozens of business
mentors, new corporate relations strategies, a new development partnership with local
startup accelerator Idea Foundry, and our new interactive Web portal at innovation.pitt.edu.
Our Web site—a work in progress—is designed to serve not only Pitt Innovators but
also students, Pittsburgh-area entrepreneurs, investors, those interested in licensing Pitt
innovations, and IEE members.
Meanwhile, we continue to foster partnerships that spark creative, innovative, and collabo-
rative collisions of ideas, leading to fascinating new innovations, as you’ll read in this report.
One of our primary goals is to promote and facilitate such convergences.
It is my privilege to be part of this exciting cultural transformation, and I’m grateful for
the support we have received from Pitt’s senior leadership and our community partners.
Make no mistake, this is a long-term community effort fueled by the imagination,
creativity, and ingenuity of Pitt Innovators and their collaborators as well as by the driving
entrepreneurial spirit that has permeated this growing region. Consequently, we can expect
great things ahead.
And the University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute is happy to be right in the middle
of it all. Remember … @PittInnovates!
Respectfully,
Marc S. Malandro
Associate Vice Chancellor for Technology Management and Commercialization
University of Pittsburgh
Thriving Innovation at Pitt
2014 Annual Report
1
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
Impact at a Glance
FY2014
$697.6
MILLION IN SPONSORED
RESEARCH funding received
by Pitt researchers
to support world-class
discovery and
innovation
6
STARTUP COMPANIES
launched around
Pitt innovations
104
PITT-BASED
STARTUPS
since 1996
$10.58
MILLION IN CAPITAL attained
by local businesses with
help from the Institute’s IEE
150
LICENSES/OPTIONS
completed for Pitt innovations
to outside partners
including startups
74
U.S. PATENTS
issued for Pitt innovations,
a new record, boosting
Pitt’s patent portfolio
to 615 issued
U.S. patents
55
LOCAL ENTREPRENEURS
ASSISTED in starting
or buying new businesses
646
BUSINESS OWNERS
COUNSELED
about business
growth issues
for a total of
6,294 hours
512
LOCAL JOBS
saved or created through
counseling
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
2
$41.8
MILLION
TOTAL REVENUE from
Pitt’s commercialization
activities
125+
STUDENTS
11 teams
4 ?rst-place teams
$100,000 in prizes
Randall Family
Big Idea Competition
PITT SPINOUT COMPANIES:
Western Oncolytics, Ltd.
Diamond Kinetics, Inc.
Nanovision Diagnostics, Inc.
Peptilogics, Inc.
UbiCue, Inc.
Sofregen Medical, Inc.
Commercialization
Entrepreneurship
Economic
Development
2014 Annual Report
3
Year in Review
uccess requires the new University of
Pittsburgh Innovation Institute and its
interrelated parts to interact in meaningful
ways with many constituent audiences, from
Pitt Innovators and their ideas and students with
entrepreneurial aspirations to local entrepreneurs
looking for assistance in starting or growing
companies and others who are looking for the
next great technology to license.
S
The Institute’s collective performance depends
on its ability to effectively serve those participating
groups; facilitate educational opportunities and
assistance; and leverage both its resources and those
of its active partners to commercialize innovations,
start companies, and contribute to the economic
development of the Pittsburgh region.
As such, the Institute’s ?scal year 2014 performance
re?ects a ?urry of activity aimed at promoting and
fostering innovation development, commercializa-
tion, and entrepreneurship on campus and beyond.
Consider the following:
INVENTION DISCLOSURES
The Institute’s Of?ce of Technology Management
(OTM) received 274 invention disclosures from
Pitt Innovators for commercial consideration this
past year, up 7.9 percent from the previous year.
That brings the cumulative number of invention
disclosures to 3,160 submitted to OTM since the
establishment of the of?ce in 1996.
Perhaps just as important to the development of
an innovation culture at Pitt, though, is the fact
that this year’s number represents the collaborative
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
4
participation of at least 518 Pitt Innovators (faculty
members, staff members, and students who partic-
ipate in the commercialization process). It marks a
nearly 10 percent increase in participation over ?scal
year 2013. It also demonstrates a greater degree of
collaboration among innovators.
And that includes students and postdocs. In fact,
of the 518 participants, 165 were students or post-
docs—almost a third of the Pitt Innovators. That’s
exciting news for the Institute, which is trying to
build a more collaborative environment that provides
education and commercialization opportunities for
Pitt students as well as faculty and staff members.
LICENSES/OPTIONS
OTM’s licensing managers remained vigilant this
past year in their efforts to negotiate licensing and
option deals outside the University for Pitt inno-
vations—with startup support from the Institute’s
Of?ce of Enterprise Development (OED) as well as
its executives in residence. All told, OTM executed
150 licenses/options for Pitt technologies, bringing
the cumulative total since 1996 to 1,122.
This includes six new startup companies launched
by the University this past year as a result of OTM
and OED’s efforts, boosting the startup total to
104 startups launched since 1996. What it doesn’t
include are OED’s ongoing efforts in 2014 to work
with at least 22 innovations—from 17 different
academic departments—with startup potential and
then work with the Pitt Innovators behind those
innovations through a series of activities designed
to further develop those business opportunities for
possible startup.
U.S. PATENTS ISSUED
The University experienced another record year in
the number of new U.S. patents issued to Pitt for its
innovations. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Of?ce
(USPTO) awarded the University 74 patents—a
45 percent increase over the previous year’s issued
patents. This speaks well of Pitt Innovators, as well
as of the diligence of OTM and the legal support it
Invention Disclosures 274
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350
225
257
310
254
INVENTION DISCLOSURES
10
11
12
13
274
14
310
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80
33
37
49
51
U.S. PATENTS ISSUED
10
11
12
13
14
74
U.S. Patents Issued 74
0 50 100 150 200
80
105
132
155
LICENSES/OPTIONS
10
11
12
13
14
150
0
1
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
2
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
3
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
4
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
5
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
TOTAL REVENUE
$6,517,348
$6,080,834
$6,165,066
$6,797,639
Legal Fee Reimbursements
Licensing Income
10
11
12
13
$41,838,040
14
Total Revenue $41,838,040
Includes:
• Licensing Income $39,840,770
• Equity Sales $0
• Legal Fee Reimbursement $1,897,270
2014 Annual Report
5
Year in Review continued
receives. It also bodes well for USPTO, which has
been striving to reduce the continued backlog of
patent applications.
Since 1996, the University has built up a portfolio
of 615 patents based on Pitt innovations—244 of
them over the past ?ve years alone. Meanwhile, the
University submitted 88 new U.S. patent applications
to USPTO for consideration in ?scal year 2014.
TOTAL REVENUE
The Institute’s commercialization activities resulted
ultimately in the generation of $41.8 million in
revenue for the University in ?scal year 2014. That
?gure does include a onetime payment to Pitt of
$35.6 million as the result of a patent infringement
settlement from Varian Medical Systems, Inc. Also
included is $4.2 million in other licensing revenue
and $2 million in patent expense reimbursement.
ENTREPRENEURIAL ASSISTANCE,
EDUCATION, AND DEVELOPMENT
The Institute for Entrepreneurial Excellence (IEE),
which also is part of the Innovation Institute,
likewise remained active in ?scal year 2014 in
providing education, networking, and entrepreneur-
ial assistance for entrepreneurs and small businesses
throughout Southwestern Pennsylvania.
CONSULTING
IEE consultants invested 6,294 collective hours in
counseling 646 local business owners about growth
issues. Of those business owners, 266 were new
clients. It also assisted 55 local entrepreneurs in their
efforts to start new businesses. Included in that ?gure
are 10 entrepreneurs who recently acquired existing
businesses. IEE also reviewed 82 business plans.
TRAINING
IEE, through its Small Business Development
Center, Entrepreneurial Fellows Center, and Urban
Entrepreneurship Program, provided a total of
27 sessions of entrepreneurial training and
development to 466 people this past year.
FUNDING AND JOBS
Entrepreneurial clients seeking ?nancial help via IEE
were able to raise nearly $10.6 million in ?nancing
for their businesses thanks to the efforts of IEE and
its consultants. Client companies also increased their
domestic sales by more than $23 million as a result
of IEE’s assistance. Moreover, consulting efforts
helped client companies to save 440 jobs in the
region while also helping to create 72 new jobs.
Startup Activity
DIAMOND KINETICS, INC.
This Pittsburgh-based startup company
was launched to commercialize and market
a motion analytics-based device and suite
of computer software applications to help
baseball players select the optimal bat size
and improve their swing. The device was
developed by mechanical engineering and
materials science professor—and admitted
baseball fanatic—William “Buddy” Clark
in collaboration with Noel Perkins,
a mechanical engineering professor
at the University of Michigan. The
system conveys the motion analytics
via a paired mobile application.
(See pro?le on page 24.)
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
6
NANOVISION DIAGNOSTICS, INC.
Bioengineering and medicine professors Yang
Liu and Randall Brand developed a novel phase
microscopy-based optical system that can eliminate
distracting variables and provide an image that
maps cell architecture in three dimensions and can
be measured at the nanoscale. Their innovation has
become the basis for this Pittsburgh-based startup
company, which will focus on the early and more
accurate diagnosis of cancerous cells from biopsy
slides. Supporting their development efforts was
the competitive Coulter Translational Research
Partners II Program in the Swanson School of
Engineering. (See pro?le on page 12.)
PEPTILOGICS, INC.
This startup, currently under the guidance of
Pittsburgh-based nonpro?t startup accelerator Idea
Foundry, is working to develop novel therapeutic
solutions in advanced wound care, cystic ?brosis,
and biodefense around peptide antibiotics that kill
antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The rationally designed
peptides were developed by Ronald Montelaro,
a professor of micro-
biology and molecular
genetics, in collaboration
with postdoctoral scholar
Jonathan Steckbeck.
SOFREGEN
MEDICAL, INC.
Plastic surgery professors
Kacey Marra and J. Peter
Rubin, in collaboration
with researchers from Tufts University, have devel-
oped an injectable, porous silk scaffold to restore
volume and regenerate soft tissue defects. The new
material, which forms the basis of this new company,
can be injected dry or hydrated and alone, with
a carrier, or in lipoaspirate.
UBICUE, INC.
Andrea Fairman, then a PhD candidate in rehabili-
tation science and technology, and her team of Pitt
researchers developed a telerehabilitation platform
for the self-management of care to help clinicians
to communicate in real time with patients with
chronic conditions. Now an instructor in the School
of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Fairman has
launched this Pittsburgh-based company to further
develop this mobile app-based technology. UbiCue
currently is receiving assistance from local startup
accelerator Idea Foundry.
WESTERN ONCOLYTICS, LTD.
This startup has licensed novel
cancer therapies from Pitt that use
genetically engineered viruses to
attack only cancer cells of solid
tumor types while also
delivering therapeutic genes.
This therapy, called WO-12,
was developed by Stephen
Thorne, a professor of surgery
and immunology. It was designed
to stimulate a stronger and more
direct immune attack against the cancer
cells than other oncolytic therapies and, at the
same time, to remove blocks to immune activity
within the environment of the tumor.
2014 Annual Report
7
Briefs
A Real Lung-saver
If 33-year-old Oklahoman Jon Sacker, who this past year
suffered from lung transplant failure in his battle against
cystic ?brosis, hadn’t heard of Pittsburgh-based startup ALung
Technologies before, he certainly has now.
Thanks largely to ALung’s new Hemolung respiratory assist
device, an emergency approval by the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration, and his doctors, Sacker was able to survive
the wait for a new lung transplant at UPMC Presbyterian. He
had come to the Pittsburgh hospital in February 2014 for his
second transplant, hospital
of?cials said, but was too sick
to undergo the surgery. That’s
when hospital of?cials turned
to ALung for help.
ALung’s device, which
removes carbon dioxide
from the blood while putting
oxygen back into the blood,
helped improve Sacker’s
condition over the next month
until he was well enough for
another transplant. But to
use the device, which isn’t yet
approved by the FDA, the hos-
pital had to seek emergency
approval. The FDA approved
the request.
“Jon was in very critical
condition when he came to
Pittsburgh, and the Hemolung
was a lifesaver for him while waiting for his second lung trans-
plant,” Maria Crespo, associate medical director of UPMC’s
Lung Transplant Program, said in a prepared statement.
The device was developed largely by Pitt bioengineering
professor William Federspiel and his research team. The com-
pany, which already earned its CE Marking in the European
Union last year, meanwhile continues to seek FDA approval to
market Hemolung in the United States.
All About Innovation and
Economic Prosperity
That’s how the Association of Public and Land-grant
Universities categorized the University of Pittsburgh recently
when it of?cially awarded Pitt and 13 other universities a des-
ignation as Innovation and Economic Prosperity Universities.
The designation recognizes universities that work extensively
with public and private sector partners within their states and
local regions to promote and foster
economic development.
“This Innovation and Economic
Prosperity University designation is an
af?rmation of the key role that
the University of Pittsburgh is playing as a
leader of innovation and economic development in Western
Pennsylvania and beyond,” Mark Nordenberg, chancellor
emeritus, said at the time in a prepared statement.
Surgery, Shunts, and Signaling Sensors:
Eight Funded Projects, 25 Collaborators
Eight groups of faculty researchers from the Schools of the
Health Sciences and Swanson School of Engineering received a
collective $100,000 boost in funding this past year to further
develop medical devices emerging from some rather unique
collaborations.
Driving this effort is the Swanson School’s Center for Medical
Innovation, whose goal is to promote early stage R&D collab-
orations between the two schools that lead to innovations with
commercial promise. All told, 25 collaborators are participating
in the following eight projects, each of which has received
between $10,000 and $25,000:
• New morcellation device for laparoscopic surgery
that prevents the accidental release of cancerous tissue
into the body
• System for rapid, accurate prehospital management
of myocardial infarct patients through the use of novel
ECG signal processing techniques
• Novel low-pro?le ?uid drainage shunt for in-utero
treatment of fetal hydrocephalus
• New surgical meshes for the treatment of pelvic organ
prolapse that avoid the complications of current devices
• Wireless EEG sensor and signal processing system for
emergency medicine, critical care, and ambulatory
monitoring
• New suture that is highly visible during placement but
becomes transparent during patient recovery
• Resorbable barrier membrane for faster and lower-cost
guided bone regeneration in periodontal applications
• Surgically implantable prosthesis for the prevention of
tracheobronchial distortion after lobar lung resection
Upstream Entrepreneurship
Aspiring entrepreneurs in Southwestern Pennsylvania’s
Mon Valley—distressed former steel towns along the
Monongahela River upstream from Pittsburgh—will be
receiving a new level of entrepreneurial education and support
from the University of Pittsburgh.
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
8
This will happen thanks to a new federally funded initiative
launched by Pitt’s Urban and Regional Research program
within the University Center for Social and Urban Research
in partnership with the Innovation Institute’s Institute for
Entrepreneurial Excellence (IEE). The U.S. Department of
Commerce’s Economic Development Administration awarded
the Urban and Regional Research program a two-year
$300,000 grant, which is being matched by the University, to
provide educational programming and business consultation
aimed at helping residents there start new small businesses.
As part of this initiative, IEE consultants will provide the
education and consultation, and the Urban and Regional
Research program will evaluate the effectiveness of such
programs in distressed areas via predetermined metrics, focus
groups, and surveys of Mon Valley residents.
“The Advancing Entrepreneurship in the Mon Valley Region
Initiative takes business professionals from Pitt and places them
within the Mon Valley community, where their experience
and expertise can do good for the people of Southwestern
Pennsylvania,” says Rhonda Carson Leach, director of the IEE’s
Urban Entrepreneurship program. Adds Sabina Deitrick, the
initiative’s principal investigator and codirector of Pitt’s Urban
and Regional Research program: “The mission of this initiative
is to create a pathway for potential small business owners in the
Mon Valley to open and develop pro?table enterprises within
their communities and link those enterprises to public and
private partnerships throughout Southwestern Pennsylvania.”
Alzheimer’s and the FDA
In ?scal year 2014, a breakthrough technology for diagnosing
early stage Alzheimer’s disease, developed at Pitt by psychiatry
professor William Klunk and radiology professor Chester
Mathis, received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval
and now is available commercially.
The technology, originally known as Pittsburgh Compound B,
is licensed to GE Healthcare, which completed the develop-
ment and clinical testing of the diagnostic agent and now
is marketing it under the name Vizamyl
™
.
The compound is a radioactive diagnostic Positron Emission
Tomography imaging agent that helps measure beta amyloid
neuritic plaque density in adult patients with cognitive
impairment. It’s the only FDA-approved imaging tracer that
provides visual interpretation of color images rather than
black-and-white images.
Dodging Diabetes
Those across the country at risk of type 2 diabetes are
receiving more than an ounce of prevention these days,
thanks to a program developed by epidemiology professor
M. Kaye Kramer and a team of researchers at the University
of Pittsburgh Diabetes Prevention Support Center.
Kramer is the director of the center, which resides in the
Graduate School of Public Health.
The program, called Group Lifestyle Balance™ (GLB), pro-
motes the idea that small changes in lifestyle, such as healthy
eating and more physical activity, could lower the chances of
developing the disease for high-risk individuals. The program
is designed to help users lose 7 percent of their weight through
healthy eating and maintain at least 150 minutes of moderate
intense physical activity weekly.
So far, the program has been adopted across the country by
more than 100 hospitals, medical foundations, community
centers, churches, military bases, and other locations with
help from the Innovation Institute’s Of?ce of Technology
Management (OTM). It also has been licensed through
OTM to a number of for-pro?t commercial partners. The
evidence-based GLB was adapted from the Diabetes Prevention
Program, a national NIH-funded study that was published
in the February 7, 2002, edition of the New England Journal
of Medicine.
Rejection Test, Approved
Pitt-based startup Plexision, Inc., received a commercial boost
this past year when it was awarded approval from the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration to market a laboratory blood
test called Pleximmune.
The blood test, developed originally by Pitt surgery professor
Rakesh Sindhi and his research team, is designed to aid in
the prediction of the risk of rejection for an organ transplant,
known as acute cellular rejection, in patients under 21 years
old who have undergone liver or small-bowel transplants.
PET scans of a patient with mild
Alzheimer’s disease on the left
and similar PET scans from a
healthy elderly person (Control)
with no memory impairment
on the right. The images were
obtained by using Pittsburgh
Compound-B (PiB).
New Web Portal
Whether you’re a Pitt Innovator, entrepreneurial
student, local business owner, mentor, investor, or a
company looking for available innovations to license,
you can gain quick access to educational information,
events calendars, news, contacts, and a searchable
database of innovations via the Innovation Institute’s
new Web site. Check it out.
INNOVATION.PITT.EDU
2014 Annual Report
9
Interns, Interns, Interns
LEVERAGING ENTREPRENEURIAL CONNECTIONS
The Innovation Institute’s Institute for Entrepreneurial
Excellence (IEE), in partnership with Pitt Student Affairs, has
launched a new internship program that will match Pitt students
with many of the thousands of local companies that receive
education, networking, and entrepreneurial assistance from IEE.
IEE staff members already are beginning to work with the
Of?ce of Career Development and Placement Assistance to
facilitate the match making, which also includes connections to
a number of outside economic development partners.
“I believe that this program will positively impact the lives of
even more students and at the same time signi?cantly support
Pittsburgh’s economies by keeping more of our graduates
employed here at local companies made even more dynamic
because of IEE’s collaborative efforts,” says Kathy Humphrey,
vice provost and dean of students at Pitt.
Adds Robert Stein, interim director of IEE, “As part of Pitt’s
Innovation Institute, we now have the resources of the entire
University at our ?ngertips and are doing more than ever to
leverage our organization to bene?t the University’s overall
economic impact.”
Coulter Collaborations:
Six New Technologies Funded
Research collaborators for six new technology-development
projects earned the attention of—and $100,000 in funding
each from—the Wallace H. Coulter Translational Research
Partners II Program in 2014.
This ?ve-year competitive grant program, led by the Swanson
School of Engineering’s bioengineering department, works to
promote and facilitate innovation development collaborations
between health sciences clinicians and bioengineering research-
ers to solve unmet clinical problems. Also contributing to this
round of funding was the Clinical and Translational Science
Institute, with an additional $100,000 in funding collectively
for the six projects.
The goal for these projects: advanced commercial development
that positions the innovations for potential startup company
consideration. The following projects received funding during
the latest round:
Briefs continued
BODYEXPLORER
This is a next-generation simulation system for training
health care providers that combines an intuitive user interface
with augmented-reality visualization, and provides real-time
feedback. Collaborators include bioengineering professor
Joseph Samosky and nursing professor John O’Donnell.
INTERACTION
Collaborators Kevin Bell, a bioengineering professor, and James
Irrgang, an orthopaedic surgery professor, are developing a new
telerehabilitation solution to promote exercise adherence for
patients who underwent total knee replacement surgery. The
system includes a wearable, portable, motion-capture device
and a Web-based computer software application for managing
and communicating joint function data to a remote therapist.
E3 THERAPEUTICS
This potential startup is based on the development of a new
platform class of anti-in?ammatory compounds aimed at
treating bronchitis and other diseases with fewer side effects
than current treatments. The compounds, which target the
FBXO3 protein, are being developed by bioengineering
professor William Chen and Rama Mallampalli, a professor
of pulmonary, allergy, and critical care medicine.
PRO-TECT™
Bioengineering professor David Brienza and surgeon Alan
Murdock have come together to develop a novel mattress
overlay for hospital intensive care unit (ICU) beds that
incorporates targeted cooling of vulnerable soft tissue near
bony prominences of the sacral area. Its purpose is to mitigate
or prevent costly sacral pressure ulcers on ICU patients.
RESMAG
Resorbable metal screws and novel plates made with a pro-
prietary alloy for repairing broken bones serve as the basis of
this Coulter project. These technologies—designed to replace
non-degrading metals such as titanium and stainless steel,
which can create surgical complications—are being developed
by bioengineering professor Prashant Kumta and Charles Sfeir,
associate dean of research in the School of Dental Medicine
and director of the Center for Craniofacial Regeneration.
SHARP
This acronym, which stands for System for Hospital Adaptive
Readmission Prevention, represents a new decision-support
system aimed at reducing hospital readmission rates by provid-
ing real-time risk estimates and personalized patient education.
The system is being developed by bioengineering professor
Rich Tsui and pediatrics professor Andrew Urbach.
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
10
Engaging Innovators and Entrepreneurs
While a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship does
require great ideas, it always has to begin and end with great
people. That’s why the Innovation Institute and its staff
members continue to put the people ?rst, whether they are Pitt
Innovators, student entrepreneurs, or local business owners.
As a service-oriented Pitt organization, Institute staff members
serve as educators and facilitators of commercialization
processes, educational programs, interactive opportunities,
business consulting, competitions and celebrations—all aimed
at helping the people of Pitt and Pittsburgh embrace a culture
driven by innovation and entrepreneurship.
This past year, with the convergence of the Of?ce of
Technology Management (OTM), Of?ce of Enterprise
Development (OED), and Institute for Entrepreneurial
Excellence (IEE) into the new Innovation Institute, the
Institute has created considerable momentum when it comes
to getting people involved.
Pitt Innovator Participants: Let’s start with innovation
commercialization. While Pitt Innovators submitted 274
invention disclosures for commercial consideration in ?scal
year 2014, more than 500 innovators actually participated in
the development of those ideas. That record number includes
165 students who contributed to such efforts. Moreover, of the
104 innovators whose innovations were licensed or optioned
outside of the University in ?scal year 2014, 15 were students.
The previous year’s innovators were honored at the annual
Celebration of Innovation, with those whose innovations
were licensed/optioned earning Pitt Innovator Awards. The
celebration last November also marked the of?cial launching
of the Institute.
Education: The Institute this past year offered its introductory
Academic Entrepreneurship course and two different sections
of its 14-week Benchtop to Bedside: What Every Scientist
Needs to Know course to faculty, staff, and students. All told,
nearly 100 people attended the three Institute-based courses.
Pitt Ventures Activities: In January 2014, as part of its startup
development activities, the Institute’s OED launched the Pitt
Ventures Gear program, which takes innovation development
teams through customer discovery, business model
development, and, ultimately, company formation.
Since it was launched, 22 teams—more
than 100 people and half of them students—entered the
process. The result so far: one new company formed, one
license in term sheet discussions, three innovations in exclusive
option negotiations, and $925,000 in additional nonfederal
funding attained.
OED also worked with 30 Pitt Innovators who participated in
the University’s annual Science Technology Showcase event.
Innovators were assigned business mentors and then produced
posters that were displayed at the reception. At least 250
people attended that campus event.
Big Idea, Wells, and Other
Competitions: As the
Institute learned this past
year, student entrepreneurs
are alive and well at
Pitt—and looking for
opportunities to compete.
The Randall Family
Big Idea Competition,
which offered $100,000
in prizes, attracted
125 students across
campus representing 12
different Pitt schools.
The competition included a Startup Weekend (attended by 120
students), elevator pitch sessions, and a startup bootcamp, and
led up to a ?nal awards program that attracted an estimated
300 attendees.
Meanwhile, the Michael G. Wells Student Health Care
Entrepreneurship Competition last year attracted 19 student
innovators, who participated in six teams. The winner received
$10,000. The Institute also supported the Pitt Innovation
Challenge, hosted by the Clinical Translational and Science
Institute. In the end, three innovator teams each won $100,000
in federal grant funding to develop their innovations.
Community: The Institute’s IEE continues to grow its mem-
bership of regional companies and their leadership. This past
year, its membership grew to 195 companies and 406 business
leaders from those companies. The membership organization
provides regular opportunities for entrepreneurial education,
training, and networking. IEE’s Entrepreneurial Fellows
Center program, meanwhile, played host last year to 36 local
entrepreneurs. The IEE also counseled 646 business
owners about growth issues and assisted 55 entre-
preneurs in starting or buying new businesses.
Rory Cooper, Distinguished Professor and chair
of the Department of Rehabilitation Science and
Technology (second from right) is presented with
the Pitt Innovator Award by Chancellor Emeritus
Mark A. Nordenberg (far right), Senior Vice
Chancellor for the Health Sciences and John
and Gertrude Petersen Dean of the School of
Medicine Arthur S. Levine (second from left),
and Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor
Patricia E. Beeson (far left).
2014 Annual Report
11
or decades, scientists have relied on the 1930s-
era technology of the phase microscope to look
at cells. Despite its extremely high sensitivity,
though, the instrument is not able to accurately
quantify the subtle changes on the nanoscale.
Moreover, the high sensitivity creates a wide array of variables
that can interfere with the image itself, such as outside noise,
vibrations, or the way the sample was prepared. Yang Liu, an
associate professor of bioengineering and medicine at the
University of Pittsburgh, and collaborator Randall Brand, a
professor of medicine, saw that as a problem they could solve.
Intrigued by the potentially high upside of using phase
microscopy, in 2009, they devised an optical system that
eliminates the variables and offers an image that maps
the architecture of the cell in three dimensions and can be
measured at the nanoscale. Their new system now allows
users to observe the tiniest changes of the architecture of
cell nuclei in biopsy slides and then predict earlier and with
far greater accuracy which cell changes likely are cancerous.
Because early diagnosis often can mean the difference
between life and death, the advantages of their system could
prove to be extraordinary.
But Liu says they knew they would need extensive commer-
cialization guidance to move their idea forward.
NanoVision
Bioengineering/medicine professor
Yang Liu and medicine professor
Randall Brand, with support from the
Wallace H. Coulter Foundation, the
Innovation Institute Pitt Ventures
program, and a committed executive
in residence, see a big future for the
startup commercializing their new
cancer-detecting microscope system.
“I was just a university professor, and I was fairly new here at
the time,” Liu says. “I really didn’t know who we should talk to.”
They didn’t have to go far for help. Liu and Brand found that
they could leverage a number of commercialization programs
at Pitt along the way. Chief among them were the Coulter
Translational Research Partners II Program in the bioengi-
neering department, which provided education, guidance, and
funding; the Of?ce of Technology Management (OTM), which
provided commercialization support; the Of?ce of Enterprise
Development (OED)’s Pitt Ventures program, which provided
the Coulter Program’s education component and startup
development support; and OED’s executive in residence (EIR)
program, which connected Liu and Brand with EIR Michael
Lang, a serial entrepreneur with experience in medical devices.
The combined effort this past year led to the launching of Pitt
spin-off NanoVision Diagnostics, Inc. Running the Pittsburgh-
based company is Lang, who spent two and a half years at
the OTM/OED looking for the right venture to launch. He says
he was impressed with the technology as well as with the
grant funding and clinical trial that Liu and Brand already
had started in support of their idea.
“I’ve been around the block a lot, and I’ve seen a lot in the
health care world,” Lang says. “What they were doing was
unique. It allows us to understand what’s going on in the
DNA in the cell nucleus.”
F
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
12
Lang says that he began to collaborate with Liu and Brand
in 2011 on potential business opportunities for their system.
As part of the process, Lang analyzed the cost of the
equipment and compared the system’s ?edgling business
model to the rest of the market. They concluded that the
best course of action was to create a new company.
Lang started NanoVision Diagnostics in late 2013, licensed
the technology from Pitt, and then left the University to
serve as the startup’s CEO. His startup team continues
to forge ahead. To date, the team has raised investment
capital, operationalized the company, and built a modi?ed
version of the original system to run higher volumes of
diagnostic tests for commercial applications. They currently
are validating the modi?ed device’s results and are
launching large-scale clinical studies with other institutions
as a basis for taking the system to market.
Because of her status as a university professor, Liu simply
consults for the company. But the satisfaction she has
realized as a Pitt Innovator is palpable.
“It’s your baby, and you want it to do well,” she says. “It’s
actually a lot of extra work from my standpoint, but we want
our technology to get to the patient. You feel what you do
is more valuable.”
Liu and Brand’s new system now
allows users to observe the tiniest
changes of the architecture of cell
nuclei in biopsy slides and then
predict earlier and with far greater
accuracy which cell changes are
likely cancerous. Because early
diagnosis often can mean the
difference between life and death,
the advantages of her system could
prove to be extraordinary.
2014 Annual Report
13
“We have a lot of good
momentum from an
idea standpoint. The
vision’s there, and
the technology is
certainly capable of
being developed.”
s Eric Sinagra pushed a three-wheeled cart
roughly resembling a baby stroller along
the sidewalks of Washington, D.C., recently,
he and his development team knew they
would be smoothing the path—at least
?guratively—for wheelchair users in the
future to ?nd better access through that city and beyond.
Known as PathMeT, the cart is a pathway measurement
tool developed by Sinagra while he was a student in the
University of Pittsburgh School of Health and Rehabilitation
Sciences along with a student team that included Ian
McIntyre; Tianyang Chen; Jonathan Duvall; and Sinagra’s
faculty advisor, Jonathan Pearlman, associate director
of engineering at Pitt’s Human Engineering Research
Laboratories, which is a partnership between Pitt, VA
Pittsburgh Healthcare System, and UPMC. The device
pro?les surfaces, collecting data about the ground it covers
with pictures and a GPS system.
PathMeT is the basis of a new startup company called
PathVu. The company, according to its Web site, pathvu.com,
has positioned itself as “the leading provider of technology
and service that ensure compliance with standards to
support accessibility, infrastructure quality, and asset
management.” Its target customers include contractors,
city planners, and municipal public works departments.
Sinagra, who graduated from Pitt in April 2014 with a
master’s degree in rehabilitation science and technology,
has joined the startup
as its president and
chief technology of?cer.
The other student team
members likewise
have joined.
The company’s chief
executive of?cer is
Chip Hanlon, who
began working with the
development team as
an executive in
residence with the
Innovation Institute’s
Of?ce of Enterprise Development (OED). He met the
development team as the students were participating
in OED’s educational First Gear program, part of Pitt Ventures.
Sinagra managed the development of PathMeT as his
master’s thesis project. His interest in the topic originated
with his older brother, who has spinal muscular atrophy and
uses a power wheelchair.
In the course of researching the commercial need for
PathMeT, Sinagra noted two legal cases related to
A Path to Success
wheelchair inaccessibility in Los
Angeles, Calif., that resulted in
multimillion-dollar settlements for the
plaintiffs. A device like his might have
helped the likes of Los Angeles to
better assess sidewalk conditions and
avoid costly lawsuits, he contends.
“If the city knows about an inacces-
sible sidewalk, the city ultimately is
partially liable,” he says, but he adds: “How do you ?x your
sidewalks unless you know what their current status is?”
But developing his device proved to be only the ?rst
challenge. Next was ?guring out how to take it to market. So
he took the Innovation Institute’s Academic Entrepreneurship
course, where he learned “a little bit of everything,” he says.
“It was a very good starting point,” Sinagra says, “because
it gave me an overview of what I needed to look at and
how I needed to start looking at things from the patent
standpoint, from the law standpoint, but also understanding
the value proposition and how I articulate that.”
Sinagra and his team also competed in the Innovation
Institute’s 2014 Randall Family Big Idea Competition—and
won $20,000 along with three other student innovation
development teams.
Those efforts have since positioned PathVu well enough
to be accepted into the state-funded Innovation Works
AlphaLab Gear accelerator program. Pearlman, the faculty
advisor and codeveloper, says that assistance from the
Innovation Institute was crucial in taking PathMeT to market.
To help him better understand, he took the Institute’s From
Benchtop to Bedside: What Every Scientist Needs to Know
course, which he says is “a really great primer on how to
think about translating what you’re doing in the lab into
industry. … Being in research is all very entrepreneurial,
but the language is different.”
Sinagra agrees. “We started off thinking we were just going
to sell these devices, and as we talked with these compa-
nies and as we talked with our mentors, we quickly realized
it’s a service/data model,” Sinagra says. “It’s the information
that really becomes important.”
In the summer of 2014, the company won its ?rst major
project: collecting more than 100 miles’ worth of sidewalk
data throughout Washington, D.C.
“We have a lot of good momentum from an idea
standpoint,” says Pearlman. “The vision’s there, and the
technology is certainly capable of being developed.”
A
Eric Sinagra
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
14
This Pitt student team, led by Eric Sinagra
and faculty advisor Jonathan Pearlman,
has created a device and company
to measure the condition and
accessibility of city sidewalks.
Left to right: Jonathan Pearlman,
Ian McIntyre, and Jonathan Duvall
Lymph Node Livers
Pathology professor Eric Lagasse has developed
a way to grow mini organs with liver
function using lymph nodes.
R
oughly 100,000 people in the United
States will be hospitalized each year with
serious liver disease, says Pitt Innovator
Eric Lagasse. But with just 6,000 organs
typically available, the chances of receiving
a transplant are slim.
Lagasse, an associate professor of pathology with a lab
at Pitt’s McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine,
believes he has found a way to circumvent those odds.
He is researching a promising new method for using
lymph nodes to grow what could be considered tiny
functioning livers that pick up the functions that are lost
when a patient’s native liver no longer can perform. Since
publishing his ?rst paper on the topic in 2011, he has
been building slowly upon more complex animal models
to demonstrate the ef?cacy of his idea.
“What we have done here is basically discover that the
lymph node is also a great site for normal cells to grow and
expand,” he explains.
It began as what he calls “sort of this crazy idea”:
transplanting liver cells into mice with liver disease in
places other than the liver to see if liver regeneration
would occur. Lagasse was surprised to ?nd that the
transplanted cells migrated to their lymph nodes, where
the cells survived and developed into functioning mini
livers. When he considered the phenomenon, he says it
made sense to him: lymph nodes function as the body’s
bioreactor for infection-?ghting T cells. When you get a
virus, the nodes—roughly 500 of which exist in the human
body—swell because they are expanding the T cells to
return to the infection and kill the virus.
Lagasse says he has been able to grow more than 20 small
livers which together function at roughly 75 percent of the
capacity of the native liver, thereby picking up the functions
that the original organ has stopped performing. Building
on some encouraging
initial data, Lagasse
now is poised to publish
research conducted on
larger animal models
in hopes of eventually
moving toward clinical
trials in humans.
A veteran of private
industry, Lagasse says
that he came to Pitt
in 2004 to continue
working on academic questions that were less interesting
to companies focused on products. Because his research
focuses on the liver, he was particularly attracted to Pitt,
which he considers “probably the best place for studying
liver biology,” because of the University’s strong history
of transplantation and cell biology.
He is hoping to earn private investment for additional
research, with an eye toward human trials, by working with
the Innovation Institute’s Of?ce of Technology Management
to negotiate a license for the liver innovation with an
outside investor.
“This is quite an out-of-the-box idea,” he acknowledges,
but he adds that researchers working in the liver transplant
?eld have been widely supportive.
“All the elements are there,” he says. “The whole thing is
really exciting. Optimistically, in a few years, we may be
able to move this into patients and change the lives of
a lot of people.”
“All the elements are
there. The whole
thing is really exciting.
Optimistically, in a
few years, we may
be able to move this
into patients and
change the lives of
a lot of people.”
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
16
T
Students can learn
to write better with
the help of the right
algorithm-driven
peer review.
he art of writing well often is perceived as intuitive,
while the art of evaluation seems inherently
subjective. But a new Pitt spinoff company built
around computer software developed by psychology
professor Christian Schunn is making a bold
statement: that students can learn to write better with the
help of the right algorithm-driven peer review.
Local serial entrepreneur and investor Mark Limbach, with
additional private investment support, last year launched
Panther Learning Systems, Inc., licensing Schunn’s inno-
vation from Pitt as the basis of the startup. The computer
software system, called Peerceptiv, evolved from a system
?rst created in 2002 by Schunn, who conducts research as
part of Pitt’s Learning Research and Development Center, to
test a fundamental theory.
“Peer review would
be much better if
students had an
incentive to treat it
seriously,” he says,
adding, “and it
didn’t require heavy
instructor oversight.”
Peerceptiv begins with a systematic peer review of papers
by classmates but then also requires authors to rate their
reviewers on how helpful their comments are. The system
then manages the reviews, basic score calculations, and the
curving of scores to produce useful grades for the instructor
and valuable feedback for the students.
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
18
Promising Peer Review
The Learning Research and Development
Center’s Christian Schunn has elevated the
virtues of student peer review to improve
writing skills, and a local startup is
taking his innovation to market.
In the early days of his development efforts, Schunn says
he initially tested his software program in a few classes
before making it publicly available, at which point its usage
proliferated. Schunn upgraded his system in 2009, and
the corresponding uptick in usage prompted him to stop
advertising because he simply didn’t have the time or
resources on his own to provide effective customer support.
“For me, it was a research fun space,” he explains, but
he didn’t see such ongoing support as part of his job as
a professor. Still, he did decide one day to participate in a
poster reception hosted by the Innovation Institute’s Of?ces
of Technology Management and Enterprise Development.
The point of the reception was to pitch ideas to potential
investors. That’s where he ?rst met Limbach, who attended
the session with investor Bill Rooney.
“After we saw Chris’ presentation, we were very
impressed,” Limbach says, noting that Schunn managed
to build a loyal following for his academic project without
any real sales effort or market development. The system
seemed ripe for commercialization, particularly in light of
seeming education trends toward larger classes and less
funding, making the job of teaching critical thinking skills
even more challenging for instructors.
Limbach says a discussion with a teacher from
Pittsburgh’s City Charter High School sealed the deal
for him. The teacher reported a whopping 98 percent
pro?ciency rating for his students on the state’s standard-
ized test—unheard of for an urban charter school—after
using Schunn’s software.
“From that point forward, it’s just been a steady
progression,” Limbach says. He now serves as Panther
Learning Systems’ chief executive of?cer; Schunn is its
director of technology, and Rooney serves as the chief
?nancial of?cer.
The company now is focusing on multiplatform integration
and making the interface simpler, easier, and more ele-
gant. Limbach also sees market potential in the corporate
world, where unbiased feedback could be of value.
For his part, Schunn is viewing the collaboration as a
marathon, not a sprint.
“You have to pace yourself accordingly—?gure out what’s
the most important piece of what you want to keep going
and have regular face-to-face time with the people who
will be in the company,” he says. “I found that to be really
quite helpful.”
Christian Schunn, left, and CEO Mark Limbach
2014 Annual Report
19
W
Wound-healing Vision
“Unless it gets
commercialized, it’s
just an interesting ?nd
in the laboratory. It’s
so important that this
sort of discovery
gets from the lab to
a commercialized
product if you want
it to actually
help people.”
A research team from pathology,
nursing and ophthalmology is
developing a peptide to improve
the healing process for glaucoma
surgery patients.
hat do you get when you combine the
wound-healing research of pathology and
nursing professors at Pitt with knowledge
from the insightful chair of the Department
of Ophthalmology and his team? You wind
up with a vision to develop a novel molecule
that helps glaucoma surgery patients to recover more
completely, saving their eyesight in the process.
Glaucoma, the second-leading cause of blindness in the
United States, affects about 2 percent of the population
over the age of 40. The condition often requires surgery,
but scarring sometimes can cause the procedure to fail,
according to Joel Schuman, chair of Pitt’s Department
of Ophthalmology, Eye & Ear Foundation Professor, and
director of the UPMC Eye Center. An agent that would allow
doctors to better regulate wound healing at the surgical site
could have tremendous impact, he notes.
Enter the research team of Alan Wells,
Thomas J. Gill III Professor of Pathology,
who collaborated with Cecelia Yates-
Binder, then a postdoctoral fellow (and
now an assistant professor in the School
of Nursing’s Department of Health
Promotion and Development), on a
project involving wound healing. They
were studying the body’s post-injury
signal that shuts off a period of rapid
growth and repair to return the wound
site to a quiet phase after an injury.
Their research identi?ed peptide
fragments that are responsible for this
form of vascular regression. Thinking it
might help diabetic patients—for whom
abnormal vascular growth is a problem,
especially in the eye—they brought their
research to Schuman, “who knows more
about the eye than even he cares to
know about,” Wells jokes.
Schuman, whose research team also includes Ian Conner,
an assistant professor of ophthalmology, says that he saw
great potential for using their peptide fragments to help
glaucoma patients. Glaucoma causes an increase in eye
pressure from a buildup of ?uid in the eyeball. To release
that pressure, surgeons will drill a hole in the eyeball, but
the surgery can leave scars that complicate recovery. In
tests on animal models, the team’s peptide both maintained
the surgical opening, built to lower eye pressure, and
caused a lining of cells at the front of the eye to grow in
larger numbers, helping to maintain the eye’s integrity and
health after surgery.
It also might serve as a treatment for dry eye, says Schuman.
“We’re hopeful that the agent will be effective there as well
as in the glaucoma surgery,” says Schuman, who describes
the new molecule as a potentially important breakthrough
for dry eye.
The team found help in commercializing its idea through
the Innovation Institute’s Of?ce of Technology Management
(OTM), which assisted with invention disclosures and
in ?ling patent applications. OTM also shepherded
the team through the process of negotiating with eye
care companies.
“They were very good in helping us to understand the
business aspects of how the process works in going from
discovery to the laboratory to an actual product,” says
Schuman, who was involved in the invention of another
device many years ago.
Wells agrees with Schuman. “At least three of us have
had experience with dealing with outside companies and
have been consulted or been involved in setting up outside
biotech, but this is not our arena,” Wells says. “It’s not the
best use of our expertise, whereas OTM has people who
have been there and done that, and they have the expertise
for guidance.”
The team hopes to ?nd the best pathway toward bringing
the molecule into a clinical trial, an important step on the
road to getting it to patients.
“Unless it gets commercialized, it’s just an interesting ?nd
in the laboratory,” says Schuman. “It’s so important that
this sort of discovery gets from the lab to a commercialized
product if you want it to actually help people.”
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
20
Left to right: Alan Wells, Joel Schuman,
and Cecelia Yates-Binder
2014 Annual Report
21
E
That was the beginning of E Properties and Development,
a company that builds and renovates structures in the
Pittsburgh neighborhoods of Lawrenceville, Gar?eld, and
Friendship, including the distinctive Croghan’s Edge devel-
opment. In fact, E Properties and Development received a
design award from the American Institute of Architects in
2012 for the innovative design of this development, which
includes four modular homes on a single property.
Many entrepreneurs, Onwugbenu says, view participation
in a program to improve management skills as time
they can’t afford to spare. But he doesn’t see it that way.
Once enrolled in the yearlong Entrepreneurial Fellows
Center program, he says he quickly recognized it as time
well invested.
“The program forced
me to step back, look
at my business, and
to be honest with
myself. I asked, ‘What
am I doing right
and wrong?’ All of
the sessions were
valuable because they
focused on practical
applications.”
meka Onwugbenu knows a thing or two about
building. Whether building a new life in the United
States, building acclaimed educational credentials,
or building a new business, Onwugbenu radiates
a passion and entrepreneurial spirit that exempli?es
the American dream.
Onwugbenu, a graduate of the Entrepreneurial Fellows
Center program at the Institute for Entrepreneurial
Excellence, which is part of the University of Pittsburgh
Innovation Institute, is the founder
and president of his own company,
E Properties and Development,
in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville
neighborhood.
Growing up in Nigeria as one of eight
siblings, he was a member of the
Igbo ethnic group long known for its
entrepreneurship. Onwugbenu says he
?rst learned about free enterprise as a
young boy by selling eggs from a pair
of chickens his grandmother gave him.
When he ?rst came to the United States
to study engineering at Pennsylvania
State University, he continued his
entrepreneurial endeavors via buying
and selling on Craigslist and eBay.
Onwugbenu graduated in 2006 and
made his way to Pittsburgh to serve
as a facilities and products engineer
for MEDRAD, a medical device
manufacturer. While there, he enrolled in Carnegie Mellon
University’s MBA program and took his ?rst steps into the
world of real estate development. Despite a very busy
schedule, Onwugbenu, who says he always had an interest
in the real estate industry, used the recession at the time
as an opportunity to buy an undervalued house and, with
the help of a hired crew, to renovate it.
Building Value and Balance
Emeka Onwugbenu, owner of E Properties and
Development in Pittsburgh, honed his entrepreneurial
acumen as a member of the Institute for
Entrepreneurial Excellence’s Entrepreneurial
Fellows Center program.
Copyright©, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 2014, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
22
“The program forced me to step back, look at my business,
and to be honest with myself,” Onwugbenu says. “I asked,
‘What am I doing right and wrong?’ All of the sessions were
valuable because they focused on practical applications.”
The Entrepreneurial Fellows Center program is a dynamic
educational experience designed to provide business
leaders with direction, knowledge, and connections to
take their businesses to the next growth level. Participants
bene?t from custom-designed program materials, peer
learning and sharing, and custom-matched mentoring.
Onwugbenu had the highest praise for the two mentors with
whom he was matched as part of the curriculum, one from
the construction industry and the other from development
and ?nance.
“The contributions made by my mentors were priceless,”
says Onwugbenu. “You can’t pay for that.”
Onwugbenu had two major goals he wanted to achieve
through the program. First, he wanted to develop a deeper
understanding of how to manage ?nancial growth. Second,
he wanted to develop a better method of choosing which
properties to purchase. The program gave him applicable
tools to accomplish both of these goals, and his classmates,
while from different ?elds, provided valuable insight as well.
“The program brought me a sense of balance,” says
Onwugbenu. “It was an investment in myself and my
business that will pay dividends for years to come.”
2014 Annual Report
23
Engineering professor
Buddy Clark transformed
his passion for baseball
into a viable motion
analytics device company
for coaches and players.
Left to right: Jeffrey Schuldt, C.J. Handron,
and William “Buddy” Clark
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
24
T
he swing of a baseball bat takes 0.2 seconds
to complete, making any critique by the
human eye dif?cult. So coaches, recruiters,
and players alike sometimes spend
countless hours watching and rewatching
?lm just to assess the quality of one swing.
Mechanical engineering and materials science professor
William “Buddy” Clark, who admits to being a baseball
fanatic, couldn’t help but see this as just another innovation
challenge. And he came out swinging.
His solution, which has become the basis for a new local
startup venture called Diamond Kinetics, Inc., is a motion
analytics-based device and suite of software applications
which the company now calls SwingTracker. The device
features a number of small sensors that capture precise
motion data in real time and send the information to a
paired mobile device, Clark says. He developed the product
in collaboration with Noel Perkins, a mechanical engineer-
ing professor from the University of Michigan.
SwingTracker allows users to compare swing metrics
against other players by age and skill level and let them
see their own swing and motion data together through
a 3-D viewer and video function.
Clark at the same time developed what he calls BatFitter,
which helps coaches and players to determine the optimal
bat size for the players.
“The question of optimal bat size turned out to be an
interesting challenge that allowed me to combine my
passion for baseball with my background in dynamic
systems and measurements,” Clark says. “I developed a
method for determining the ideal bat for players based on
their individual abilities. Initially, the method focused only
on speci?c parameters of the swing, but that evolved into
the use of inertial sensors that could capture the complete
path of the swing—every detail of the bat’s motion—which
provides a huge amount of data for coaches and players
that’s never been available before.”
So began Clark’s entrepreneurial journey, and soon the
issue was raised of how Clark would get his products to
market. So he turned to the University of Pittsburgh Institute
for Entrepreneurial Excellence (IEE), which is part of the
Innovation Institute, for help. He worked closely with IEE’s
PantherlabWorks program, which assists entrepreneurs in
technology-based startup development, and its director
at the time, C.J. Handron.
“I understood the technology but was in the dark about
what needed to be done on the business side,” Clark, a
proli?c Pitt Innovator, admits. “Visiting IEE was probably the
best decision I made in the early days of the company. They
provided a tremendous amount of help in developing the
business model, planning for fundrais-
ing, and generally getting the company
from concept to reality.”
Says Handron of the relationship, which
extended beyond simply a professional
consulting role, “I’m a baseball guy
through and through. I know how to
approach the target market because
I am the target market.”
In fact, Handron found himself so
impassioned by the business opportu-
nity that he eventually decided to take
on the role of CEO of Diamond Kinetics
full time and left IEE.
“We worked together for almost a
year at IEE before I made the decision
to join the company full time as CEO
to build out the infrastructure from a
business perspective,” Handron says. “Through my work
at IEE, I developed a strong network within the early stage
technology community, which certainly has been valuable
as we work to raise capital and add team members.”
Diamond Kinetics and its products since have been featured
in Sports Illustrated, on the Web site Mashable, and at
the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. It also found
a spot on the Pittsburgh Business Times’ “20 Companies
to Watch in 2014” list.
Moreover, Handron says, additional applications and uses
of the technology in these sports are in development, which
should come as no surprise. “Diamond Kinetics remains
focused on driving a fundamental change in baseball and
softball training and performance.”
“Through my work
at IEE, I developed
a strong network
within the early-
stage technology
community, which
certainly has been
valuable as we work to
raise capital and
add team members.”
Swinging for the Fences
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2014 Annual Report
25
QuitNinja
A
“The PInCh competition
is well designed and
provides a fantastic
opportunity for Pitt
and its community
of researchers. The
course prepared me
for the competition by
teaching me invaluable
entrepreneurial skills
and how to effectively
pitch an idea.”
s creatures of habit, people easily fall into patterns
of behavior. This certainly rings true for those trying
to quit smoking, who face triggers throughout the
day that make them want to light up. If only those
smokers could have an encouraging reminder to not
smoke when the impulse to do so presents itself,
they might be more successful in quitting.
Ellen Beckjord, an assistant professor of psychiatry and of
clinical and translational science, and her research team,
including technology partner Vignet Corporation, have, in
fact, developed a unique mobile app for
that. She calls their smoking cessation
support system QuitNinja.
Beckjord says she has found in her
work as a psychologist that many
patients want to stop unhealthy behav-
iors such as smoking, but because
direct behavior reinforcements are not
available in real time—at the moment
when the patients often need them
the most, they fail in their attempts to
change their behavior.
QuitNinja is a context-aware smart-
phone application focused on improv-
ing self-regulation in the context of
smoking cessation, Beckjord explains.
It uses evidence-based, ecological
momentary assessment protocols to
gather data in real time from smokers
during a quit attempt and then delivers
context-appropriate messages and
images to help them stay motivated to
resist the urge to smoke.
This ability to provide evidence-based real-time interven-
tion, she says, is what differentiates QuitNinja from other
smoking cessation and health behavior change apps.
“Face-to-face counseling can’t reach people when they
really need it,” Beckjord says. “A mobile platform is the
game changer that can extend the reach. While other apps
provide some real-time intervention delivery, QuitNinja
provides intervention at the right time.”
Her team’s development is paying off, especially on
campus. In spring 2014, Beckjord and her team entered
QuitNinja in the ?rst-ever Pitt Innovation Challenge (PInCh),
which was hosted by Pitt’s Clinical and Translational
Science Institute in collaboration with the Of?ce of the
Provost and the Innovation Institute. The PInCh competition
focuses on encouraging innovation development and
commercialization around health care solutions. Of the
93 submissions to the competition, QuitNinja was named
one of only three ?rst-place winners.
As a result, the QuitNinja team was awarded a $100,000
grant to further develop the innovation along with a
project manager to help execute a 12-month project
development plan.
“It was humbling to see the other teams’ ideas,” says
Beckjord of her competitors.
Beckjord says she ?rst learned about the PInCh competition
through an educational course offered yearly by the
Innovation Institute titled From Benchtop to Bedside:
What Every Scientist Needs to Know. The course teaches
researchers and clinicians how to transform basic research
discoveries into commercial products and companies for
the bene?t of patients.
Beckjord says she has appreciated the commercialization
education and development opportunities at Pitt.
“The PInCh competition is well designed and provides a
fantastic opportunity for Pitt and its community of research-
ers,” she says. “The course prepared me for the competition
by teaching me invaluable entrepreneurial skills and how
to effectively pitch an idea.”
Moving forward, Beckjord says her team plans to use the
PInCh funds to develop a new version of QuitNinja that
can predict when smokers most likely will encounter urges
to smoke so that interventions can be delivered not only
in real time but preemptively, without users having to
ask for help.
As Beckjord noted in her PInCh pitch: “We don’t want
the QuitNinja user experience to only be ‘I can reach
out to QuitNinja for help.’ We want the user experience
to be ‘QuitNinja knows when I need help and reaches
out to me.’ ”
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
26
Psychiatry professor Ellen Beckjord
and her team have developed a mobile
app that provides real-time—and maybe
preemptive—behavior reinforcement
for smokers trying to quit.
Ellen Beckjord with her
daughter, Louise Burke
Staff Directory
Marc Malandro
Associate Vice Chancellor for
Technology Management and
Commercialization and Interim
Director, Innovation Institute
412-624-8787
Daniel Bates
Strategic Relations
Manager
412-624-4474
Carla Crawford
Executive Assistant to the
Associate Vice Chancellor for
Technology Management and
Commercialization
412-383-7665
Gregory Coticchia
Executive in Residence
412-401-5423
Innovation Institute
Administration
Of?ce of Technology
Management
Babs Carryer
Director of Education
and Outreach
412-624-3172
David Ruppersberger
Director, Joint Economic
Development Initiatives
412-624-3157
Alexander Ducruet
Assistant Director,
Licensing
412-648-2219
Martania Felton
Intellectual Property
Assistant
412-648-2201
Stacey Rizzo
Accountant
412-648-2226
Jason Somma
Intellectual Property
and Licensing
Associate
412-648-2220
Harold Swift
Technology Licensing
Manager
412-648-2236
Lynette Jacobs-Priebe
Accountant
412-624-0219
Kelly Mertz
Financial Analysis and
Reporting Manager
412-383-7139
Andrew Remes
Technology Licensing
Manager
412-624-3134
Janice Panza
Technology Licensing
Associate
412-648-2225
Michelle McAllister
Government Compliance
Administrator
412-648-2203
Lisa Spano
Technology Licensing
Assistant
412-648-2206
Paul Petrovich
Assistant Director,
Technology
Commercialization
412-624-3138
Amy Phillips
Business Development
Manager
412-624-4977
Karen Zellars
Administrative
Coordinator
412-624-3160
Sandy Latini (Not Shown)
Business Manager
412-383-7664
Jenifer Tarasi
Associate Director,
Intellectual Property
412-648-3220
Maria Vanegas
Technology Licensing
Manager
412-648-4004
Carolyn Weber
Technology Licensing
Associate
412-383-7140
Of?ce of Enterprise
Development
Evan Facher
Director, Enterprise
Development
412-624-3152
University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute
28
Institute for Entrepreneurial
Excellence
Rhonda Carson Leach
Director, Urban
Entrepreneurship Program
412-624-2326
Lauren DeJulio
Account and Grants
Administrator
412-648-1704
Tara Gerek
Events Logistics Manager
412-648-1389
John Dobransky
Business Outreach Coordinator
412-624-2290
Joseph Ciotti
Management Consultant
412-624-0119
Lindsey Gilkes
Senior Management
Consultant
412-624-0189
Robert Stein
Interim Director, IEE
412-648-1540
Victoria Lopez
Consultant
412-648-4183
Katie Robison
Membership Manager
412-624-5678
Allen Jones
Supply Chain Consultant
412-648-1545
Rachel LaMarco
Administrative Assistant
412-648-2005
Catherine Tyson
Senior Management
Consultant
412-648-1546
Raymond Vargo
Director, Small Business
Development Center
412-624-1199
Dione Cahillane (not shown)
Director, Entrepreneurial
Fellows Program
412-648-1066
Angela Wagner (not shown)
Marketing Manager
412-624-5436
Shelley Taylor
Membership Director
412-648-4060
2014 Annual Report
29
Innovation Institute
200 Gardner Steel Conference Center
Thackeray and O’Hara Streets
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Web innovation.pitt.edu
The University of Pittsburgh is an af?rmative action, equal opportunity institution. Published in cooperation with the Department of Communication Services. DCS97083-0914
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