Adventure Biosciences is the product of a cross-disciplinary collaboration at Pitt’s Johnstown campus
Surrounded by her two co-founders and with the president of the University of Pittsburgh Johnstown campus smiling proudly beside her, Jill Henning was the first to put ink to paper on the agreement forming Pitt’s newest startup company, Adventure Biosciences.
The new company name reflects the journey Henning and her colleagues have been on over the past seven years to translate their innovation from the lab to the market, supported by the Pitt innovation system, which extends to the university’s satellite campuses.
Henning, professor of biology at Pitt Johnstown, had been studying tick-borne diseases since her undergraduate days. She decided to approach her colleague Manisha Nigam in the chemistry department with an idea she had been pondering to develop a safe and sustainable method to disrupt ticks’ ability to target a human host.
Instead of masking human scent with toxic chemical repellents like DEET, she proposed creating an all-natural lotion containing hemoglobin, the protein in blood that binds to carbon dioxide, to absorb the CO₂ emitted from skin before ticks can detect it. Ticks have organs in their forelegs that sense carbon dioxide to locate a human host.
Nigam was intrigued by the idea. But then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and they shelved it as they focused on the virus.
Once the pandemic subsided, Henning and Nigam approached their colleague, Matt Tracey, about entering the Pitt Innovation Challenge, hosted by the Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. To their delight, they won a $100,000 award to test their idea.
With the prize money, the team built what they called a “tick arena” and worked alongside students to film ticks’ movement inside while pumping in carbon dioxide as a control, and then filmed their activity with human arms, both with nothing applied to the skin, and with their beta hemoglobin lotion applied.
Their experiments proved that their approach worked in repelling ticks.
That’s when they began working with the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (OIE) to begin exploring the commercial potential of their innovation. They were assigned an entrepreneur in residence, Priya Amin, who counseled them on protecting their intellectual property and urged them to consider forming a startup company instead of licensing their IP to an existing company to develop a product around the innovation.
“I have been working with this team for a year and a half, and they have been such a pleasure to work with,” Amin said. “They are so coachable and eager to learn, and brave enough to be open to the idea of starting their own company.”
After submitting an invention disclosure to the OIE, their first step toward commercialization was to participate in a month-long NSF I-Corps short course, where they conducted dozens of customer discovery interviews to uncover the value their innovation could deliver to potential customers and other stakeholders.
“We are researchers,” Nigam said. “The NSF I-Corps class helped us to understand the business side of things.”
Their next step was to enter the Wells Student HealthTech Challenge in 2024, where, in her role as undergraduate research coordinator, Henning recruited a student, Korina Pebley, to pitch their innovation against other students from larger, better-funded labs from the main campus. They came away with a $5,000 prize.
With momentum building for the commercial potential of their innovation, Amin connected them with a consultant with deep experience in the consumer product industry who is currently helping the team identify potential manufacturers, raise capital, and develop a go-to-market strategy.
In the meantime, Henning, Nigam, and Tracey have become celebrities on campus for their innovation pursuits, including the presence of Pitt Johnstown President Jem Spectar at the option signing event.
“We may be from a small campus, but we can do big things,” Spectar said. “We are so proud of you for what you have done. Research is most impactful when it addresses community needs and improves the quality of human health and well-being. This research and the effort to bring it into the real world do precisely that.”
The success of the team behind Adventure Biosciences reflects a growing culture of innovation at Pitt’s satellite campuses. The Pitt Research office recently awarded four Regional Catalyst Grants to faculty at Pitt Johnstown and Pitt Greensburg to support their research with commercial potential. Tracey from the Adventure Biosciences team is the recipient of one of them to build a library of synthetic bacterial inhibitors to combat antibiotic resistance. As with the tick repellent project, this project will heavily involve undergraduate students in the research.
Henning is quick to credit the support from the OIE and Pitt overall for giving her and her co-founders the guidance and the courage to commercialize their innovation.
“If it wasn’t for the support we have received from the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, there is no way we would be doing this,” Henning said. “We would have probably just published a paper and moved on.”
Instead, they are looking forward to the day when their new adventure bears fruit.
If you are a Pitt innovator with a research discovery that may have commercial potential, submit an invention disclosure to the OIE today.
