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.”��

The new , one of only 10 across the U.S., is part of the operational backbone of the NSF’s National Innovation Network, which helps translate academic research for the marketplace. The Hubs are charged with providing experiential entrepreneurship training to researchers across all fields of science and engineering while working to build diverse and inclusive regional innovation ecosystems.

The MidSouth Hub is a collaboration among nine regional research universities, led by Vanderbilt University and including UofL, George Mason University, Jackson State University, Meharry Medical College, Tennessee State University, the University of Kentucky, the University of Tennessee – Knoxville and the University of Virginia. As part of the Hub, UofL will receive $1 million over five years to support focused product development and training.��

“As a top-tier, Carnegie Research-1 university, UofL has a strong track record as a driver of technological innovation and entrepreneurship,” said Kevin Gardner, executive vice president for research and innovation. “We are excited to work with our Mid-South Hub partner institutions to accelerate that work, furthering important and often life-saving technologies, launching new growth-focused companies and creating opportunity here and beyond.”��

UofL’s role in the new hub follows years of leadership as a member of NSF’s I-Corps Site Program. UofL was named an I-Corps Site in 2015, the first in Kentucky, and has since awarded product development training and microgrants to more than 250 innovative faculty, staff and students.

Those awards have supported the creation of at least 16��new companies, eight intellectual property��licensing agreements and more than $8 million in follow-on funding secured to further product development. Several UofL teams also have been selected to participate in the competitive I-Corps National TEAMS program, each receiving $50,000 to further develop technologies that could improve health care through artificial intelligence, extend the shelf-life of donated blood and more.��

“Our goal is to take these brilliant research-backed ideas out of the lab and develop them into full-fledged, market-ready products that can improve the way we live and work,” said Will Metcalf, an associate vice president for research and innovation and a lead for the UofL program. “Participating in the new Mid-South Hub dramatically expands our ability to support the development and growth of scalable companies that bring ideas to life.”����

UofL’s I-Corps programming is led by UofL New Ventures in the , and includes entrepreneurial mentors, prototyping support and , UofL’s eight-week product innovation bootcamp. The office strives to launch and scale innovative companies that can bring technologies to market and solve big problems.

I-Corps is part of UofL’s unique suite of prestigious, grant-backed programs aimed at supporting the translation of research into viable commercial products. UofL is one of only a handful of universities in the country to host each of these innovation-associated programs — and it’s the only one to receive��all��of them.

“These programs have helped support a wide range of technologies and teams, helping them learn the product development process and lens,” said Jessica Sharon, director of innovation programs and a lead on the UofL Hub program. “Through this new Hub, we are very excited to work with our regional partner universities to train more innovators and get research-backed products to market.”

Six projects were selected this funding cycle, two of which are from UofL:

• Pediatric NeuroRecovery Posture Control System (researcher Andrea Behrman)
• Vertify Probe: Intraoperative Device for Measurement of Bone Quality (researchers Stuart Williams, Maxwell Boakye and Michael Voor)

KYNETIC is a statewide program supported by $6.6 million in funding, including a $4 million��Research Evaluation and Commercialization Hub (REACH) grant from the National Institutes of Health and matching funds. The goal is to advance the most promising biomedical research innovations — including pharmaceuticals, devices and apps — from the state’s eight public universities and the Kentucky Community & Technical College System (KCTCS).

KYNETIC grants support six-month, milestone-driven projects focused on��quickly determining whether or not each technology is viable as a commercial product.��Awardees will receive funding for product-focused research and development, attend trainings, and get advice from program staff, industry, investors and other experts on identifying needs, navigating regulations and protecting their intellectual property.��

Paula Bates, professor of medicine at UofL, who co-leads KYNETIC, said the idea is to spur innovation and economic development through collaboration.

“I’m very pleased with the strong projects awarded in this cycle of KYNETIC, each of which will have a positive impact on human health,” she said. “Collaboration and innovation go hand-in-hand, and that’s our goal with KYNETIC. It’s a really powerful way to use our collective expertise to help to turn great ideas from our state into products that improve people’s health and wellbeing.”

Applications for the next cycle of KYNETIC funding are ��and��require a two-page pre-proposal. Funding cycles are offered twice a year and are open to faculty, staff, trainees and students. Competitive renewal opportunities are available.

Launched in 2019, the KYNETIC program builds on UofL’s strong history of translational research support, which includes a prestigious for turning research into products.

“Through these programs, UofL supports commercialization of the work being done by our researchers here,” said Jessica Sharon, UofL’s director of innovation programs. “The goal is to translate research into products that can improve, or even save, lives.”

KYNETIC is led by UofL, the University of Kentucky, the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development, and Kentucky Commercialization Ventures, and works closely with Kentucky’s regional universities and KCTCS.

The program provides training and $50,000 in funding that helps university researchers translate the ideas they develop in the lab into new, technology-backed startups. Participating teams complete an intense, two-month bootcamp learning about commercialization, engaging with industry and talking to potential customers.

Two projects from UofL were chosen to participate in recent bootcamp cohorts:

• BioCaRGOS, short for Capture and Release Gels for Optimized Storage (bioCaRGOS), uses a novel water-based stabilizer to enable storage of sensitive biospecimens like RNA, DNA or proteins at low temperatures for long periods of time, including during transport to remote locations. The project team includes: co-inventors Gautam Gupta and��Rajat Chauhan, both in the J.B. Speed School of Engineering, and business mentor Jeff Cummins, who also is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence with the UofL Office of Research and Innovation.

• ARNA, short for , an artificially intelligent health care robot created to provide round-the-clock patient monitoring and allow nurses to focus more on direct patient care by taking on some of their time-consuming tasks. The project team includes: co-inventors Dan Popa and Sumit Kumar Das, of engineering, and business mentor Mary Tapolsky, of the UofL Forcht Center for Entrepreneurship.

Chauhan, of the BioCaRGOS team, said the experience helped his team find an industry commercialization partner. They currently are seeking partners for an upcoming application NSF Partnerships for Innovation program, which allows NSF-backed projects like his to work with industry on research and development and accelerate the technology’s path to market.

“Vaccine stability (especially for COVID-19) remains a critical challenge and is the critical bottleneck for effective distribution of the state-of-art MRNA based vaccines to current population,” said Chauhan, BioCaRGOS entrepreneurial lead and a postdoctoral research scientist. “Our technology has the potential to advance the delivery of vaccines at room temperature, a feat that cannot be achieved currently.”

Teams must be nominated for the national I-Corps bootcamp, and must first complete a regional . Both the BioCARGOS and ARNA teams completed UofL’s I-Corps site program — part of UofL’s suite of��, that also includes the UofL , NIH and NSF programs. I-Corps at UofL requires successful participation and completion of , UofL’s own 10-week entrepreneurial bootcamp.

“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 the ARNA and BioCARGOS teams, and their work to accelerate product development of their innovations to address unmet needs in the market.”��

He and 167 other inventors from institutions around the world will be formally recognized as 2019 NAI Fellows at a ceremony in Phoenix, Arizona, in April 2020, according to a .

“It is a great honor for me to be one of the NAI fellows,” said El-Baz, a UofL J.B. Speed School of Engineering alum and chair of bioengineering.

At UofL, El-Baz works at the intersection of computer science and medicine. Many of his inventions use artificial intelligence to analyze medical images, allowing them to very accurately diagnose everything from ��to to .

El-Baz is the sixth UofL inventor to be inducted into the NAI, following Suzanne Ildstad and Kevin Walsh (2014); William Pierce (2015); Paula Bates (2016); and most recently, Robert S. Keynton (2017).

“We’re very proud of Ayman, and all past UofL inductees, for this huge accomplishment and all the hard work behind it,” said Allen Morris, executive director of the . His office works with UofL researchers, like , to commercialize their inventions.��

“This kind of honor shows our university’s commitment to and leadership in research, invention and technology commercialization,” he said. “These inventions have the power to change and improve the way we work and live.”

Aside from the EPI-Center, El-Baz has also worked with other UofL programs for technology development and commercialization. He was the first researcher to hit a “trifecta” with UofL’s suite of��, having earned entry into the UofL Coulter Translational Partnership, NSF I-Corps and NSF AWARE:ACCESS programs.

“These crucial support mechanisms have enabled me to develop and translate technologies from ideation to commercialization quickly,” El-Baz said.

To date, El-Baz holds eight patents, five copyrights and has had 11 technologies optioned and two have been licensed to companies for further development and commercialization. Some technologies have also resulted in startup ventures like Autism Diagnostics Technologies Inc., which El-Baz co-founded, creating jobs and economic development.��

NAI fellows hold a collective 41,500 issued U.S. patents, resulting in 11,000 licensed technologies and companies, generating more than 36 million jobs and $1.6 trillion in revenue, according to the release.

“I am so impressed by the caliber of this year’s class of NAI Fellows, all of whom are highly-regarded in their respective fields,” NAI President Paul R. Sanberg said in the release. “The breadth and scope of their discovery is truly staggering. I’m excited not only see their work continue, but also to see their knowledge influence a new era of science, technology, and innovation worldwide.”

The EIRs, under the UofL (EVPRI), will provide guidance on product development, business planning and other activities to accelerate the commercialization of university inventions. UofL’s EIRs are:

• Josh Nickols, PhD, MBA, a seasoned biotechnology entrepreneur and venture adviser with experience in commercializing technologies born at higher education institutions;
• Jeff Cummins, MBA, a finance and business development executive with experience in start-up and fast-growth companies;
• Charley Miller, MPS, a technology startup founder, product manager and game designer with a focus on systems and user journey.

UofL ranks as one of only 120 U.S. “Research 1” universities with “very high research activity,” according to the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher ����ֱ��. The EIRs will amplify UofL’s existing efforts aimed at getting technologies born from that research to market, which include a “superfecta” of .

“UofL research has produced groundbreaking innovations that have impacted a great number of industries and could impact so many more,” said UofL President��Neeli Bendapudi. “By pairing those innovations with seasoned, tested entrepreneurs, we can accelerate their journey from idea to the marketplace, generating new products and companies and making the world a better place.”

Each EIR will serve a six-month term, beginning in April, and will work with the and researchers. More information on the EIRs is available .��

“UofL is full of potential game-changing technologies,” Nickols said. “I’m excited to work with faculty and staff at UofL to drive those innovations toward market.”

Funding for the EIRs comes from the , a public-private partnership, led by UofL and backed by the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development, to grow Louisville’s entrepreneurship ecosystem.

“Together, we will commercialize university research, enhance the region’s reputation for innovation, grow jobs and economic development and build the next generation of leaders in the health care sector,” said UofL president Dr. Neeli Bendapudi.��

The entrepreneur-led hub, dubbed the Louisville Entrepreneurship Acceleration Partnership (LEAP), is backed by a multimillion-dollar through the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development. The award is $1.3 million per year for up to five years.

The LEAP effort joins several players in the Louisville entrepreneurship ecosystem — UofL, the and , along with support from GLI’s Enterprise Corp., the MED Institute and Techstars.

“It is inspiring to see the expertise of these partners come together for the common good,” said Will Metcalf, UofL’s executive director of and the principal investigator on the grant. “Together we are building a community that cultivates and supports elite entrepreneurs.”

LEAP has also hired a seasoned entrepreneur, Wendy Lea, to spearhead its programs and initiatives. Lea is the previous CEO of , a public-private partnership innovation hub focused on economic development and creating value for both startups and large companies.

“This RISE partnership will kick Louisville’s startup ecosystem into high gear,” Lea said. “I look forward to taking a promising ecosystem to the next level.”

The partnership will also include support from GLI’s Enterprise Corp, the entrepreneurial arm of the Louisville chamber of commerce, which will work with LEAP’s board on education and mentorship programs. Also, TechStars, a national tech accelerator, will support program initiatives.��

Each partner brings its own expertise, and will contribute to programming that includes physical space, entrepreneurial training, building funding channels, forging connections between startups and big companies and other support.��

“Through this collaboration, LEAP will tie together and evolve Kentucky’s existing entrepreneurial ecosystem to cultivate fast growth startup companies and attract the people and financial resources needed to create further innovation and entrepreneurship,” said Tammy York Day, president and CEO of LHCC.

Check out video from today’s announcement:��

The hub is backed by a federal grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is potentially valued at a total of $3.5 million over three years, with nearly $500,000 in funding the first year.��

“At the University of Louisville, we firmly believe that we can solve the problems that plague our region through collaboration,” said UofL President, Dr. Neeli Bendapudi. “This partnership with the private sector and an impressive consortium of area academic institutions will help speed groundbreaking advances in health care technology to the market, resulting in healthier citizens and a stronger economy.”

Leading the grant is , a Louisville-based healthcare technology accelerator that focuses on startups and commercialization. The hub also joins 24 academic institutions led by UofL, the University of Kentucky and West Virginia University.

Together, they will create an “accelerator hub” — one of four funded by NIGMS — for biomedical technologies in the Southeast Institutional Development Award (IDeA) region, which includes Kentucky, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Puerto Rico, South Carolina and West Virginia.��

As part of the hub, the grant partners will create online education, resources and tools for commercialization that all the participating institutions can use. There will also be focused�� support to assist where those services are not currently available.

“We are grateful to the NIH to have entrusted our team with this grant so that we can move scientific discoveries out of the lab and into commercial products, ultimately improving patient care and enhancing human health,” said Jackie Willmot, co-founder and CEO of XLerateHealth.��“Our hub will provide researchers and innovators with entrepreneurial knowledge and skills that will enable them to create and commercialize successful, sustainable businesses.”

According to Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM)’s 2016 Annual Survey, academic institutions in the Southeast IDeA region performed more than $1.5 billion in federally-funded research and generated 38 startup companies.��The institutions participating in this grant made up 66 percent of that research and 82 percent of the region’s newly licensed startup companies.

UofL, for example, has developed a robust translational research, commercialization and entrepreneurship infrastructure. It is��the only research university in the country to receive four prestigious translational research programs:�� and through the National Science Foundation, through NIH, and the .

“The partners on this grant have had great success with commercialization, providing startup support and implementing other programs for ,” said Dr. Robert S. Keynton, UofL’s Interim Executive Vice President for Research and Innovation and a principal investigator on the grant. “By expanding multi-state, multi-institutional access to those resources, we believe we can have a big national impact.”

Check out video from today’s press conference announcing the Regional Biomedical Technology Accelerator Hub:��

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 milk exosome-drug delivery tool, invented by UofL’s Dr. Ramesh Gupta and his team members – Dr. Radha Munagala, Dr. Farrukh Aqil and Jeyaprakash Jeyabalan –��could improve how humans absorb drugs meant to treat disease and relieve pain. Now, two companies – PureTech Health and Roche – are working to advance the technology and get it to market.

“This field is emerging, it’s so new,” said Gupta, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology��and endowed chair of oncological research at the UofL School of Medicine, James Graham Brown Cancer Center. “We want to take this to tens of millions of people.”

Gupta said many drugs are taken orally, but they may not be fully absorbed once they get to the stomach.

This technology could improve the absorption rate by loading the drugs into milk-derived nanoparticles tiny enough to easily move through tissue and cross the blood-brain barrier. Gupta ensures drugs are delivered to the right part of the body (or the right “zipcode,” as he puts it) by “decorating” the nanoparticles with antibodies or folic acid or some other ligand.

This is a platform technology, Gupta said, meaning it could have numerous applications. Just as a computer can run many programs, the milk exosomes can be used to deliver many drugs and treat many diseases, such as ��������𾱳����’s, Parkinson’s or cancer.

“This technology has the potential to help a lot of people,” said Dr. Holly Clark, deputy director of UofL’s Office of Technology Transfer (OTT). “That’s our goal — we want to get the groundbreaking research happening in our labs to market, where it can help people.”

Gupta initially founded a startup company, 3P Biotechnologies, and licensed the technology from the OTT. The office worked closely with��3P Biotechnologies on a commercialization strategy involving a sublicense to clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, PureTech Health, in Boston.

Now, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd and Hoffmann-La Roche Inc., a Swiss pharmaceutical giant,��has signed an agreement with PureTech to use the technology for the oral administration of Roche’s antisense oligonucleotide platform.

PureTech is working with Gupta to develop drug delivery applications of the exosome technology, and 3P Biotechnologies is exploring additional applications as far ranging as veterinary medicines, nutraceuticals and cosmeceuticals, as well as bulk production of exosomes.

“Universities are doing a lot of great work. They’re the birthplace of a lot of these ideas, and move them forward,” said PureTech senior associate, Dr. Rishab Shyam. “We look forward to building this relationship and taking this technology forward.”