infographic with the word start-up

A Busy Year for Duke New Ventures

Research is the seed capital for creating knowledge to foster innovation: FY19 Annual Report for Duke New Ventures

Each year, Duke research yields new ideas and innovation with the potential for commercialization. Our highly-skilled and talented faculty and staff supply the Office of Licensing and Ventures (OLV) with an endless pipeline of novel opportunities.

The commercialization of these ideas starts with converting research at Duke into intellectual property (IP). For those inventors who want to be more hands-on with their technology, they can opt to form their own spin-out company instead of licensing to an existing one. An entrepreneur’s starting point for turning Duke IP into a start-up company is Duke New Ventures.

Two Duke spin-outs, Precision BioSciences and PhaseBio Pharmaceuticals, went public this past spring­­ bringing Duke’s total IPOs to nine. Located here in the Triangle, Precision’s recent opening of a new $26 million manufacturing facility is spurring economic growth and interest in the area, acting as an “anchor tenant”.

Phasebio Logo

Precision Biosciences Logo

From TSA body scanning technology to software that can predict and overcome cancer drug resistance, 16 new start-up companies were added this year to the growing list formed from Duke research–bringing Duke’s overall start-up total to 142. 14 of this years 16 are staying in North Carolina, with 29 of 32 total start-ups remaining in the Triangle over the past two years.

Additionally, six of Duke’s ventures “graduated” this fiscal year–meaning they have procured the management and capital to move forward, either via financing or with sales revenue. Congratulations to Cellective Biotherapy, Gavilán Biodesign, MicroElastic Ultrasound, Phitonex, SV Analytics, and CCDS.

FY19 Duke Start-upsList of 2019 Duke Start-ups

The Duke New Ventures team has made over 115 introductions for our portfolio companies this year—to investors, management, service providers, and strategic partners. These introductions resulted in management team hires, partnerships, and sales for our startups.

“I’m excited about the role Duke New Ventures is playing in the Duke Entrepreneurial ecosystem and beyond,” said Hallford. “Our ties with I&E, Pratt, DIHI, Fuqua, ORAQ, CTSI, BioLabs NC, and the School of Medicine have never been stronger.”

Hallford feels this is largely due to his MIRs—the heart of the program. The culture of collaboration starts with them working behind the scenes to connect Duke startups and move things forward. This year, two new MIRs joined the team—Diane Ignar and Doreen Grech.

Ignar and Grech made an immediate impact in coaching Duke startups for Duke New Venture’s first ever Venture Day this past May. At this event, eight Duke companies pitched their novel ideas, along with five poster presentations, in front of a dozen venture capital (VC) firms, including 10 from out of town.

Rob Hallford at Duke Venture Day May 2019
Rob Hallford at Duke Venture Day May 2019

“Three of our companies have proceeded into due diligence with VC firms in attendance—a testament to the quality of startups coming out of Duke,” Hallford said.

Overall, $372 million was raised by Duke start-ups this past fiscal year, bringing the total capital raised in the past 25 years to just over $5.4 billion.

Another facet of Duke New Ventures is the New Venture Fellows program, which continues to make great strides. New Ventures had nine Fellows last Fall and 13 this Spring. NVF efforts have played a key role in advancing many startups this past year.

Jess Levitt, Assistant Director for Fuqua’s Health Sector Management (HSM) Program who works closely with many of the NVFs noted that the NVF program has been of increasing interest to both current and prospective HSM students. It appeals to students with a variety of career interests, from those looking to work with start-up companies, students interested in joining a venture capital firm, those hoping to work in strategy roles or on mergers and acquisitions, to individuals hoping to start their own company someday.

“All of these students benefit from working on meaningful projects where they have the ability to make a real impact and do so in a learning-based environment under the expert guidance of an MIR with the support of the New Ventures Program,” Levitt said.

The resources we put in place for our start-ups—the MIRs and New Venture Fellows—are one part of the equation, aimed at telling a clear story for every opportunity. “It’s only when these stories resonate with and engage the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem that Duke innovations can take off and move toward the market,” said Robin Rasor, Executive Director for OLV.

Programmer working about software cyberspace

The Rapid Growth of Digital Innovations at Duke

From the rise of the internet to a booming digital economy: FY19 Annual Report in Software

Since Time Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1990, the way we live, shop, work, communicate, and even order our coffee has undergone a fundamental change.  This change has required a huge investment in improving the way we connect to the internet.

A new study from the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) reported that the digital economy—hardware, software, e-commerce, digital media, telecommunications, support services—accounts for 6.9% or $1.4 trillion of the U.S. GDP in 2017.

As with increasing innovations, the makeup of the digital economy has shifted in the past 20 years, most notably with hardware falling and e-commerce and digital media on the rise.

woman on cell phone at desk with laptop

This can be seen in the Digital Innovations (DI) portfolio for Duke’s Office of Licensing & Ventures (OLV) ­–which only includes software, data, and content from across the university, medical center, and health system.  These innovations have inherent protectable IP and despite their rapidly evolving nature can have significant value and potential for commercialization.

This year, almost 30% of the 354 FY19 invention disclosures were DI. Additionally, 14 of 32 exclusive licenses and 7 of 16 start-ups were DI.
Digital Innovations Numbers Graph

Reflecting on the evolving nature of research and innovation at the university, health system, and across the country, DI disclosures have more than quadrupled with a corresponding growth in licensing and startups. Additionally, DI disclosures come from departments, schools, institutes, and centers spanning the breadth of Duke University and Duke Health including administrative and service groups such as Duke Libraries, Duke OIT, DHTS, and Duke PRMO.

The combination of Duke innovators being at the forefront of the use of AI, machine learning, the Internet of Things (IoT), and data analytics is improving health care.

“Education has led to a rapid increase in collaborations–both internal and external–and the development of new technologies,” said Dinesh Divakaran, Associate Director of Software Licensing at OLV. “OLV works with our innovators in creative ways to protect and commercialize these new technologies while catalyzing startups and also identifying licensing partnerships with companies to develop products and services.”

Protecting & Licensing DI

Digital Innovations can be protected under different types of intellectual property laws, with each affording a different type and level of legal protection. Computer programs (source code, object code, scripts), screen materials, and databases may be protected under copyright laws, or even maintained as proprietary information (universities generally do not have trade secrets).

Certain methods and algorithms underlying software could be patentable, and although trademarks don’t necessarily protect the technology, they could protect the names or symbols that make the technology-based product or service unique within a market.

Intellectual property due diligence and selecting the optimal model for licensing software can be a critical determination that can drive business and provide the right protection for intellectual property rights. OLV’s knowledge and expertise in these areas help to guide innovators down the right path.

Joel Greenburg
Joel Greenburg

“OLV was open to discussing different licensing options for the software developed at Duke and, in the end, both Quadridox and Duke walked away happy with the terms and a newly established partnership,” said Joel Greenburg, President and CEO of Quadridox, a software spinout company specializing in the use of X-ray physics to develop real-world solutions in the security arena, such as airport screening.

Greenburg, a Pratt School of Engineering Associate Research Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, further stated, “We are particularly excited about leveraging the mentorship opportunities available to Duke spinout companies.”

OLV’s Duke New Ventures (DNV) is a 2-year-old initiative that helps new start-ups think through opportunities, craft a business plan, and connect with the management, mentors, and investors to ensure the success of the new venture.

DNV’s Mentors-in-Residence program involves using seasoned entrepreneurs to bring their insights, experiences, and numerous connections to nascent companies. One example is assistance given to Duke software startup, Gavilán Biodesign, that has pioneered an algorithm to anticipate and overcome drug resistance.

“Duke’s tech transfer team helped us every step of the way as we moved from academic researchers to entrepreneurs. Our first meetings with OLV got us early investor conversations and even one of our first partnerships,” said Jonathan Jou, co-founder of Gavilán.

Digital Health and Health IT at Duke

DI has been driving a revolution in the health care industry. At Duke, most of the DI disclosures are in the field of digital health and Healthcare IT. From SaMD and digital therapeutics to clinical decision support tools and screening tools that improve clinical decisions, DI is empowering both clinicians and patients to make better decisions in health care.

However, these improvements are not without their challenges, especially when thinking beyond the campus and our hospitals.

“The challenge with health care innovations is achieving dissemination and scale. OLV helped us translate a good idea to improve patient care at Duke into a sustainable idea that could improve patient care across the world,” said Arif Kamal, CEO of Prepped Health, a Duke start-up that created a mobile health platform to help patients prepare for their journey with serious illness.

There is tremendous growth in digital health and healthcare IT innovations. Duke is uniquely positioned to help reshape the technology landscape in health care, especially with the move towards value-based healthcare delivery and the need to measure healthcare outcomes.

The University’s transdisciplinary teams of innovators work closely with OLV during the technology development process. Together they identify and select optimal approaches to protect intellectual property and map commercialization pathways, while improving adoption of digital solutions that support our clinicians in providing the best care to our patients.

Suresh Balu speaking with Dr. Manesh Patel, Chief, Division of Clinical Pharmacology and Chief, Division of Cardiology
Suresh Balu speaking with Dr. Manesh Patel, Chief, Division of Clinical Pharmacology and
Chief, Division of Cardiology

Last year, Duke Health developed and deployed Sepsis Watch, an augmented intelligence solution for early detection of sepsis. “We needed help to scale our technology beyond Duke. OLV was instrumental in securing our licensing deal with Cohere Med, thus helping this Duke-developed technology to reach global markets and have a broader impact,” said Suresh Balu, Director of the Duke Institute for Health Innovation (DIHI). “With strong support from OLV, we continue to explore a partnership model with Cohere Med.”

There are additional factors to consider when developing digital health ideas at Duke, such as conflict of interest questions–data sensitivity of patient health records or personal information.

“There are many privacy and information security questions you’ll need to think through, especially with regard to data obtained from Duke. However, OLV has developed relationships across campus and outside to help you navigate these processes,” said Divakaran.

Digital Innovation has come a long way since the 1990s and we’re on an accelerated path of innovation growth.  With greater connectivity, we can access a greater amount of data, providing us with better decisions.

“From our relationships formed on campus to partnerships formed off, Duke is taking cutting edge technologies to the forefront of the innovation ecosystem,” said Robin Rasor, Executive Director of OLV. “We are leading the way to transfer Duke’s knowledge and expertise with the clear goal of reaching the public market for the benefit society.”

close up of eye

Lumedica Vision

MANAGEMENT: Adam Wax
DUKE INVENTOR: Adam Wax
lumedicavision.com

Lumedica Vision was founded by an experienced team of engineers including Chief Scientist Dr. Adam Wax from the Pratt School of Engineering. Dr. Wax’s team has developed a new low-cost optical coherence tomography (OCT) scanner that could dramatically extend the impact of the imaging technology for eye health by making eye imaging more affordable, accessible and easier to use. Affordable access would enable more health care providers to conduct OCT imaging, giving patients greater, earlier access to the one test that can save their vision and improve their quality of life.

Lumedica Vision Logo
Lumedica OCT Prototype

THE PROBLEM:

Seen as the gold standard for early detection of diseases including macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma – each of which can threaten vision while remaining symptomless – OCT remains an expensive procedure.  “Once you have lost vision, it’s very difficult to get it back, so the key to preventing blindness is early detection,” said Adam Wax

The challenge is access.

  • Current OCT focus on features keeps prices high and out of reach
  • Many developing countries have little or no access to OCT
  • Older OCTs in Eastern Europe have limited diagnostic efficacy
  • US Optometrists: 40% balk at high price of entry
  • Primary Care Physicians: Too complex and expensive to operate

THE SOLUTION:

“Our goal is to make OCT drastically less expensive, so more clinics can afford the devices, especially in global health settings,” said Wax

The key to the cost reduction is the innovative spectrometer design. This approach takes light on a circular path – rather than the conventional combination of lenses, mirrors and precision diffractive optics. The overall result is a product which reduces the typical weight of a clinical OCT system from 50-70 pounds down to just 4 pounds, while cutting the cost from at least $60,000 to less than $14,000.

What is OCT?

Optical Coherence Tomography is the light-equivalent to SONAR, sending signals to, then reflecting off of surfaces in order to measure depths of individual layers. Those collective signal measurements form an image of the retinal layers, where eye diseases quietly lurk, and can be accurately detected. Although OCT has been available for over 25 years, it remains an expensive technology to manufacture and operate. The use of high-quality optics, precision components and complex software have put this technology out of reach for most healthcare providers worldwide.

ultrasound image

Omnisono

DUKE INVENTOR: Josh Broder

Duke/Stanford spinout OmniSono has developed a new low-cost system enabling 2D ultrasound machines to perform rapid, high-quality, oriented 3D and multiplanar ultrasound imaging. With a price-point less than 1/10th that of existing 3D solutions and features for ease-of-use, OmniSono will greatly expand the accessibility and size of the ultrasound market.

Omnisono logo
Cohere Med licenses technology from Duke to drive adoption of early Sepsis detection using AI

“Deep Sepsis” Licensed to Cohere Med

Cohere Med licenses technology from Duke to drive adoption of early Sepsis detection using AI

cohere med logo

PRESS RELEASE: 3 JULY 2019

Sepsis strikes more than a million Americans every year and 15 to 30 percent of those affected die. Caused by an overwhelming immune response to infection, sepsis rates have steadily been on the rise in the country. This is a major challenge in hospitals, where it is one of the leading causes of death. It is also a main reason why people are readmitted to the hospital. Sepsis occurs unpredictably and can progress rapidly. It often involves a prolonged stay in the intensive care unit and complex therapies with high costs. Sepsis as the most expensive condition treated in U.S. hospitals, costing nearly $24 billion in 2013.

Late last year, Duke Health developed and deployed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system for early detection of sepsis. “Significant progress has been made since then to validate the accuracy of the model that we developed,” said Suresh Balu, Director of the Duke Institute for Health Innovation (DIHI). “With a deep learning model ingesting over 50,000 patient records and more than 32 million data points, we are able to identify patients at risk for developing sepsis with greater than 90% accuracy,” he added. Traditional scoring mechanisms such as NEWS, SIRS, and QSOFA usually start with high detectability from the time a patient presents to Emergency Department (ED) but their accuracy decrease over time making detectability of sepsis harder with a large number of false positives.

To scale the solution further across the globe, Cohere Med, a clinical analytics company based in the US and India has licensed technology from Duke University. Cohere Med’s CoMeT- Coherence of Medical Things® platform is built to deploy enterprise-class AI solutions for health systems in critical care. CoMeT further is expected to enhance the technology with real-time processing of events using internet of things (IoT) for high fidelity clinical data, interoperability standards such as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), electronic medical records (EMR) extensions to ease the integration of sepsis detection, and management into already installed information systems along with a host of other deep learning-based algorithms. “Identifying and predicting patient decompensation for critically ill is a key focus area as we bring in high fidelity information across systems together in real-time,” said Srikanth Muthya, CEO, Cohere Med.

 

For more information: www.cohere-med.com and contact@cohere-med.com

 

References:

https://www.nigms.nih.gov/education/pages/factsheet_sepsis.aspx#1

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/quality/duke-university-hospital-to-roll-out-ai- system-for-sepsis.html

Close up finger pointing into the ipo text with initial public offering concept.

PhaseBio IPO Values BioPharma Company at $46M

PhaseBio, a biotechnology company spun out of Duke is developing therapies for pulmonary arterial hypertension and for bleeding in patients taking antiplatelet therapy. This past October it  made its initial public offering.  The Malvern, Pennsylvania-based company began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol PHAS and priced its IPO of 9.2 million shares at $5 per share, for a total of about $46 million.

phasebio-logo

PhaseBio is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company founded by Duke inventors Drs. Chilkoti and Setton. Committed to developing new and improved biotherapeutics for the treatment of serious rare diseases, their proprietary technology platform uses recombinant elastin-like polypeptide (ELP) biopolymers to control the half-life, bioavailability and physical characteristics of molecules for ease of administration.

In Sept. 5, the company announced the closure of a Series D financing round worth $34 million, with participation from new investors Cormorant Asset Management, Rock Springs Capital and Mountain Group Partners. Existing investors include New Enterprise Associates, Hatteras Venture Partners, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson Innovation – JJDC, Syno Capital and Fletcher Spaght Ventures.

Three days after the S-1 filing, the company announced positive results from the Phase I study of PB2452, a reversal agent for the antiplatelet drug ticagrelor, a drug used in patients with acute coronary syndrome to reduce the rate of cardiovascular death, heart attack and stroke. The trial was a safety study in healthy volunteers and showed PB2452 achieved rapid, complete and sustained reversal of ticagrelor’s activity, with potential for customizable duration of reversal based on dosing regimen.

PhaseBio in-licensed the drug from AstraZeneca last year, announcing a global license agreement with MedImmune, the latter company’s biologics research and development arm, where the drug had been developed under the name MEDI2452. The drug is a fragment antigen-binding antibody fragment that the company said is designed to rapidly reverse ticagrelor’s antiplatelet effects in emergency situations. While approved for reducing the rate of cardiovascular events, ticagrelor’s label also carries a boxed warning stating that, like other antiplatelet agents, it can cause significant and sometimes fatal bleeding.

PhaseBio’s lead product candidate is PB1046, in Phase IIb testing for PAH, with data expected in the first half of 2020.

Supercomputer code successfully models behavior of interwoven vasculature created with new 3D printing technique

HARVEY Helps Move Bioprinted Organs Closer to Reality

Supercomputer code successfully models behavior of interwoven vasculature created with new 3D printing technique

Supercomputer code successfully models behavior of interwoven vasculature created with new 3D printing technique

With the help of a dash of turmeric and blueberry, bioengineers have developed a technique for 3D printing complex, interwoven vascular networks that mimic many of the movements and forces of those found in real organs.

The technique could help researchers understand how the flexing of entangled pathways for blood, air, lymph and other vital fluids affect each systems’ function and move the field closer toward bioprinting entire organs.

To better understand the forces and stresses at work in the new networks, the researchers turned to one of the world’s most sophisticated systems for computationally modelling blood flow. Developed by Amanda Randles, the Alfred Winborne and Victoria Stover Mordecai Assistant Professor of Biomedical Sciences at Duke University, HARVEY is a supercomputer code capable of simulating blood flow through the human vasculature down to the cellular level.

Led by bioengineers Jordan Miller of Rice University and Kelly Stevens of the University of Washington (UW), the research appears online on the cover of Science on May 3. It includes a visually stunning proof-of-principle—a hydrogel model of a lung-mimicking air sac in which airways deliver oxygen to surrounding blood vessels.

“One of the biggest road blocks to generating functional tissue has been our inability to print the complex vasculature that can supply nutrients to densely populated tissues,” said Miller, assistant professor of bioengineering at Rice’s Brown School of Engineering. “Our organs contain independent vascular networks—like the airways and blood vessels of the lung or the bile ducts and blood vessels in the liver. These interpenetrating networks are physically and biochemically entangled, and the architecture itself is intimately related to tissue function. Ours is the first bioprinting technology that addresses the challenge of multivascularization in a direct and comprehensive way.”

The new open-source bioprinting technology is dubbed the “stereolithography apparatus for tissue engineering,” or SLATE. The system works by printing a sequence of layers from a liquid pre-hydrogel solution that becomes a solid when exposed to blue light.

 

Read the full story here

[Originally posted by Duke Pratt School of Engineering — May 2, 2019]

Gavilan scientist playing chess with green virus

Gavilán Biodesign

MANAGEMENT:
DUKE INVENTOR: Bruce Donald, Jonathan Jou, Marcel Frenkel, Mark Hallen
gavilanbio.com

Gavilán Biodesign combines state of the art physics-based modeling with our unique high accuracy AI platform to computationally screen trillions of molecules in order to find therapeutics that can overcome resistance. Gavilán is the first to add the dimension of evolution and time in our screens! We do this through our proprietary design software suite called Sylph that can design both biologics and small molecules for specificity and resistance resilience.   

gavilan logo

Our algorithms are based on rigorous mathematical guarantees allowing us to make confident predictions about our chemical space and continuously improve our predictions through improvements to our entropy-aware, continuously flexible, high accuracy biophysical models that are already the most sophisticated models of their kind for combinatorial drug design.

Explore Beyond, Leave Nothing Unseen

Gavilán Biodesign uses its proprietary computational chemistry approach to develop novel antineoplastic therapeutics that are resilient to the emergence of drug resistance. The ability of cancer to develop resistance to therapeutics is the number one contributing force to mortality. Gavilan is building on the success of the OSPREY software package developed in the Donald lab at Duke University, expanding it to not only predict but also design new molecules capable of overcoming drug resistance.

The Science

Gavilán is a results-oriented company that believes that accuracy of predictions is paramount. Therefore, Gavilán utilizes state-of-the-art algorithms that are guaranteed to find the best results within our chemical space despite our screens routinely having trillions of molecules. Nothing is left unseen: our algorithms guarantee no good compound is left behind and no resistance mutation gets through. As our accuracy is only limited by our physical models, Gavilán builds the most sophisticated models of any group performing combinatorial computational chemistry by taking into account entropy and continuous flexibility.

Phitonex

MANAGEMENT: Mike Standinsky
DUKE INVENTOR: Alvin Lebeck, Chris Dwyer
phitonex.com

Phitonex, Inc. is bringing a new way of thinking about fluorescence and experimental design to the life science laboratory. We will transform the way light is used in life science with a first focus on single cells, the fundamental unit of health and disease.

Phitonex logo

We have developed a platform that allows us to deterministically engineer optical properties to provide high resolution analysis of single cells by flow cytometry, and in the future, other applications. Lower noise, less spectral overlap, and fluorescence-by-design means that our dyes immediately unlock a higher number of parameters across current instrumentation and provide unmatched cell population resolution to drive enhanced biological insight.

We are also the first team to develop, design, and validate spectral dyes.

laptop image of phitonex product showing before and after

Phitonex uses a DNA nanotechnology platform to create highly customizable, deterministic fluorescent nanoparticles called Phitons™. This platform enables rapid innovation of labels across the spectrum with high FRET efficiencies, minimized cross-excitation, and reduced spectral spillover.

Our line of NovaFluor™ labels provide cleaner fluorescence signals with reduced cross-excitation for maximizing channel utilization.

Our upcoming InfiniFluors™ offer custom spectral signatures for greater multiplexing in spectral cytometers.

verity video example

Verity Biosciences

DUKE INVENTOR: Jorge Obando

Gastroenterologists are some of the busiest specialists in the hospital. There is an expected shortage of gastroenterologists by 2024, of about 10%. Endoscopy represents approximately 70% of our daily activities.

Verity BioSciences is hoping to replace or reinforce the post op conversation with individalized videos.

verity logo