The frequency of collaboration happening behind the scenes at Vanderbilt is quite simply amazing. Recently, we had the opportunity to sit down with a team of biomedical engineers who have been working closely with one of Vanderbilt’s elite vascular surgeons to develop a special material that coats cardiovascular stents, making them more flexible, more shapeable, and more effective in correcting clogged or blocked arteries.
“We started with a different idea for our material,” said Vanderbilt Assistant Professor in Biomedical Engineering Hak-Joon Sung, Ph.D. “We met Dr. Colleen Brophy, and she gave us a very interesting paper based on the concept of external support. We decided to use our material to develop a new vascular stent that would hopefully increase the longevity of stents and decrease the likelihood for repeat procedures.”
The material Sung refers to is a polycaprolactone-based material that has already been approved for many FDA uses – drug delivery vehicle, tissue engineering scaffold, etc. For the vascular stents, Sung’s team modified that material so that it could have shape memory properties at body temperature.
“At the time of the surgery, you can manipulate the material to cover the critical areas of the vein/artery interface,” said Timothy Boire, biomedical engineering graduate student. “Where the vein and artery are connected, you can cover those areas to promote greater laminar flow.”
Realizing the commercial potential for improving the world’s most common cardiovascular procedure, Sung and Boire applied for a spot in the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps Program. The nine-week program walks teams through the discovery phases of commercializing a product. Teams participate in intensive entrepreneurial workshops; interview prospective customers, partners and competitors to determine product viability; and begin assessing product marketability.
“It will be a great learning process,” said Boire who will serve as Team VenoStent’s entrepreneurial lead during the Fall 2014 cohort in Austin, Texas. “I am interested in translating ideas from the benchtop to the clinic and this will help me understand the means to do that. I’m very much looking forward to the opportunity of bringing this idea, or any idea I have, to the clinic for society to use.”
Boire continued, “If we don’t commercialize these technologies, they are just an idea. I want to be on the interface between product design and customer interaction. “
Sung will serve as principal investigator for Team VenoStent. They will be mentored by EndoInSight CEO Byron Smith, who was the entrepreneurial lead for Vanderbilt’s first team selected to participate in the Innovation Corps.