Sue Hunter’s eyes widened as Jordyn Ting played a recording of a man with a chronic traumatic brain injury from a stroke, attempting to say words like “mother” and “zucchini,” before and after receiving electrical stimulation from an electrode placed deep inside the thalamus region of his brain.
The pre-stimulation attempts are garbled and incomprehensible. However, with each subsequent repetition after the stimulation is activated, his words, although still strained, become clearly understandable.
The same man, Ting reported, can now control his facial muscles to smile while the stimulation device is active, rather than displaying a drooping countenance when it is not.
“That return to normalcy is huge,” Hunter said with the satisfaction of knowing that the support her family foundation is providing for Ting’s work is helping to accelerate the science on the path to wider impact through commercial translation.
Ting told Hunter during a recent tour of the Rehab Neural Engineering Labs at the new UPMC Mercy Pavilion in Pittsburgh’s Uptown neighborhood that she is grateful for receiving the most recent Hunter Family Foundation Traumatic Brain Injury Translational Research Program grant. This program supports innovations addressing unmet needs in neuroscience, as identified by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh.
Solving an Unmet Need
A postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Elvira Pirondini, assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation, Ting is working to solve the problem of dysphagia, or difficulty swallowing and speaking, for people suffering chronic brain injuries. There are limited treatments for this condition, which often results in prolonged hospital stays, weight loss, malnutrition, and a significantly increased risk of pneumonia from aspiration.
The technology they are developing, which will be further advanced using the Hunter Foundation grant, has demonstrated remarkable results. The same patient, who is now able to speak and smile, had previously been on a restricted diet of only pureed foods due to the likelihood of choking, and is now able to eat a steak normally, Pirondini said.
Ting and Pirondini are conducting additional studies to expand the patient population that will benefit from their innovation. She and her team are also exploring the economics of current treatment regimens and creating a compelling business case for the adoption of their treatment.
Since her time as a PhD student, Ting has been educated and mentored on commercialization through the Innovation Institute, part of the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. She completed an NSF I-Corps short course where she conducted numerous interviews with physicians, insurers, and other stakeholders to better understand the unmet needs her lab’s innovation could solve. She continues to be mentored by Dan Broderick, an entrepreneur-in-residence at the Innovation Institute.
De-Risking Technology to Improve Odds of Commercial Success
Following the success of Dr. Pirondini’s lab’s testing on three patients, Ting has been awarded a Pitt SPARK grant of $240,000 to conduct expanded testing of the technology. The new funding program, supported by Pitt Health Sciences, is designed for Pitt technologies with high commercial potential and compelling proof-of-concept data, aiming to accelerate the path to commercialization.
Ting has formed a startup company, Lexi Medical, together with Pirondini and Jorge González-Martínez, professor in the Department of Neurological Surgery, that she said will seek to license the intellectual property from the university within the next two years.
At the recent visit by Hunter to the Neural Engineering Labs, Evan Facher, Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Pittsburgh and Associate Dean for Commercial Translation in the School of Medicine, highlighted how Pitt’s growing innovation ecosystem is helping innovators like Ting achieve commercialization goals, fueling the expansion of the life sciences sector in Western Pennsylvania.
“We are seeing many examples of Pitt spinouts that choose to stay here and grow, keeping jobs and economic activity in our backyard,” Facher said. “That only happens when you’ve built a critical mass of talent, funding, and facilities, and that’s what we’ve been working toward over the past decade.”
Facher said that internal Pitt programs, such as Pitt.INC, the Commercialization Gap Fund, and Pitt SPARK, are helping innovators cross this so-called “valley of death.”
He added that foundations, like the Hunter Foundation, are increasingly stepping forward to augment university resources and help advance Pitt’s deep pipeline of promising innovations toward the market.
Pitt Neurological Rehabilitation Research Making Giant Strides
During her visit, Hunter also received updates from Marco Capogrosso, professor in the Department of Neurosurgery, and Jennifer Collinger, professor in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, who were recipients of the inaugural Hunter Foundation TBI grants.
Collinger said the grant has helped speed the development of the robotic aspects of her work, helping people with severe brain injury to control a computer mouse or exoskeletons simply by thinking. She is also working to give users of robotic hands the sense of touch, while providing them greater control over robotic hands and optimizing the movement to appear as closely as possible to that of a natural arm. Students in the lab are also using machine learning for this purpose.
The Rehab Neural Engineering Labs is outfitted with a simulated apartment living space to demonstrate to patients, providers, and the FDA how this technology can be used safely and reliably by patients in a home setting.
Capogrosso’s work focuses on the restoration of sensory and motor function after neural damage or disease. He said his team’s work was recently accepted for publication in a prominent journal and has received a $250,000 grant from the state to assist with their first-in-human trial. He added that they are collaborating with a major medical device manufacturer in pursuit of a new NIH translational research grant.
Capogrosso said there is no other academic research lab doing as much translational work around neural rehabilitation as the Rehab Neural Engineering Labs. He said the 80 participating faculty, along with postdocs, graduate students, and staff, are collegial and collaborative, creating an environment ripe for innovation.
“I’m excited to see how the commercialization proceeds,” Hunter said at the end of her visit.