The program provides training and $50,000 to develop new, technology-backed startups. The UofL team, led by School of Medicine research scientist Matthew Neal, completed an intensive, two-month boot camp learning about commercialization, engaging with industry and talking to more than 100 potential customers.

Neal and his collaborators — co-technical leads Pavel Zahorik and Shae Morgan, both in the audiology department — are developing a virtual reality-based technology to help patients test different models and program their hearing aids, without leaving the comfort of the clinical setting.��

With this tool, audiologists could use a VR headset or a wide screen display to demonstrate how specific hearing aid models and settings would perform in different, realistic environments, such as a school, noisy restaurant, grocery store or church. The idea, Neal said, is to help patients find the right fit.

“It’s kind of like test-driving a new car and seeing how it performs in real-world conditions,” Neal said. “We want to help people choose the hearing aid and get it programmed specifically for the specific environments where they have trouble, and with virtual reality technologies, you can do that without leaving your audiologist’s office.”

According to the National Institutes of Health, one in eight Americans over the age of 12 have some degree of hearing loss and about 28.8 million adults could benefit from using hearing aids.

Following the I-Corps national program, the researchers now are developing a working prototype and considering various funding routes to continue research efforts and pursue commercialization of the technology. Their product development efforts are supported by business mentor Tendai Charasika, an Entrepreneur-in-Residence in the UofL Office of Research and Innovation.

The team is also in a research partnership with both the��Heuser��Hearing Institute, a not-for-profit hearing healthcare organization serving Kentuckiana, and Sonova, a hearing aid manufacturer.

“We are proud that our decades-long partnership with the University of Louisville to further the field of audiology with cutting-edge hearing healthcare technology has led to this recognition,” said House CEO Brett Bachmann.��“Congratulations��to Matthew Neal, Pavel Zahorik and Shae Morgan.

Teams must be nominated for the national I-Corps Teams bootcamp, and must first complete UofL’s regional I-Corps site program and , UofL’s product innovation bootcamp. UofL and partners recently received $15 million from the National Science Foundation to launch a new regional��NSF Mid-South��Innovation Corps��(I-Corps) Hub, one of only 10 across the U.S.

Neal’s team also received funding and coaching through UofL’s Pandemic-Related Product Acceleration & Responsive Entrepreneurship Program, or PRePARE, which partners UofL researchers with companies and members of the community to scale up innovative ideas addressing health, economic and societal issues caused by pandemics. The PRePARE program fostered the additional collaboration between UofL and Heuser Hearing Institute.��

“These programs support commercialization of the work being done by our researchers here at UofL,” said Jessica Sharon, UofL’s director of innovation programs. “We’re proud of Matthew and the team at the Heuser Hearing Institute, and their work to accelerate product development of this innovation that addresses unmet needs in the�� market and could help many people.”��

Those startups are:

Meta Construction LLC��($350,000). Nick McRae and Max Kommor founded Meta Construction, a construction technology company, as students in the UofL Entrepreneurship MBA program. They , BlackTop, a software platform that lets asphalt contractors locate dump trucks and get the right number to construction sites. They also previously participated in UofL’s (I-Corps) site program.��

Innovative Therapeutix��($250,000). Innovative Therapeutix is collaborating with UofL to develop , a . The company was founded by��Michael Detmer, a UofL adjunct professor of music therapy, and��Rebekah Gossom, a Norton Healthcare speech-language pathologist. They worked with the UofL��Office of Technology Transfer (OTT) to protect and commercialize the technology, and also participated in the�� site and ��programs at UofL.

Vivorte��($800,000). Vivorte ��invented by UofL associate professor of bioengineering,��Dr. Michael Voor. Voor worked with the OTT to protect the intellectual property and come up with a commercialization strategy, resulting in licensing to the UofL start-up company, Vivorte.�� Vivorte has received FDA clearance to .

The companies represent one-third of this year’s Vogt class. They are:

• True Secure SCADA, which��, a cybersecurity tool for utility and manufacturing companies. The co-founders are Drs. Jim Graham, Jeff Hieb, and John Naber from the .��
• Pascal Tags, which has a battery-free, smart tag��. The co-founders are engineering student Brandon Young and Haley Pfeiffer, who recently graduated with a degree in marketing and minor in entrepreneurship. Young invented the technology with Dr. Thad Druffel, who also served as a technical adviser.��

The UofL innovators worked with the UofL to protect and commercialize their intellectual property. Both also participated in UofL’s entrepreneurship training and the����site program��for translational research.��

Pfeiffer said the Pascal team also got business advice from Dr. Robert Garrett, of the College of Business, and Adam Casson, of Inscope Medical Solutions (another UofL startup and ).

“This award is an amazing opportunity for us,” she said. “We have been working tirelessly on testing and customer discovery. The funding and mentorship from the Vogt Awards will allow us to launch our company and change the way that companies manage their inventory.”

The Vogt Awards are awarded annually through the��Vogt Invention & Innovation Fund at the Community Foundation of Louisville. Winners are given $25,000 in non-dilutive funding, along with a suite of services and mentoring, according to a release.��

EnterpriseCorp, the entrepreneurship arm of the city’s chamber of commerce, plans to conduct the mentoring in the fall. According to the release, the startups will have access to a range of mentors and experts, who will provide more than 300 hours of unpaid consultation time.

Each team will show off their progress at Vogt Awards Demo Day, held during Global Entrepreneurship Week in November.��