Tag: Andrei Georgescu

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Two Penn Bioengineering Professors Receive PCI Innovation Awards

From left to right: Marc Singer, Kirsten Leute, D. Kacy Cullen, Dan Huh, Doug Smith, and Haig Aghajanian

Two Penn Bioengineering Professors have received awards in the 7th Annual Celebration of Innovation from the Penn Center for Innovation (PCI).

Dongeun (Dan) Huh, Associate Professor in the Department of Bioengineering, was named the 2022 Inventor of the Year. D. Kacy Cullen, Associate Professor of Neurosurgery with a secondary appointment in Bioengineering, accepted the Deal of the Year Award on behalf of his company Innervace along with Co-Scientific Founder Douglas H. Smith, Robert A. Groff Professor of Teaching and Research in Neurosurgery in the Perelman School of Medicine.

PCI is interdisciplinary center for technology commercialization and startups in the Penn community. Their 7th Annual Celebration, held on December 6, 2022 at the Singh Center for Nanotechnology, honored Penn researchers and inventors whose achievements were a particular highlight of the fiscal year.

Huh was honored in recognition of his “extraordinary innovations in bioengineering tools.” The Huh Biologically Inspired Engineering Systems Laboratory (BIOLines) Laboratory is a leader in tissue engineering and cell-based smart biomedical devices, particularly in the “lab-on-a-chip” field of devices which can approximate the functioning of organs. Their research has been featured by the National Science Foundation (NSF, video below) and Wired, and has received a competitive Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) grant. Most recently, their “implantation-on-a-chip” technology has been used to better understand early-stage pregnancy. Huh and former lab member Andrei Georgescu (Ph.D. in Bioengineering, 2021) founded the spinoff company Vivodyne to bring this organ-on-a-chip technology to the industry sector. Fast Company included Vivodyne in a list of “most innovative” companies.

Innervace, represented by Cullen and Smith, took home the Deal of the Year award in recognition of its “successful Series A funding.” Innervace is another Penn spinoff which develops “anatomically inspired living scaffolds for brain pathway reconstruction.” Innervace raised up to $40 million in Series A financing to “accelerate a new cell therapy modality for the treatment of neurological disorders.” The Cullen Lab at Penn Medicine combines neuroengineering, regenerative medicine, and the study of neurotrauma to improve understanding of neural injury and develop cutting-edge neural tissue engineering-based treatments to promote regeneration and restore function.

Read the full list of 2022 PCI Award winners here.

Read more stories featuring Dan Huh and D. Kacy Cullen.

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Bionegineering Spin-off Vivodyne on Fast Company’s ‘Most Innovative’ List

Andrei Georgescu (left) and Dan Huh developed several organ-on-a-chip platforms in Huh’s lab. Their spin-off company, Vivodyne, aims to use the technology as a scalable alternative to animal testing in the pharmaceutical industry.

With Vivodyne, Associate Professor in the Department of Bioengineering Dan Huh is translating the organs-on-chips technology into a promising industry venture. Using microfluidic structures that mimic aspects of human physiology, organs-on-chips allow scientists to test therapies on lab-grown human cells. Vivodyne specifically focuses on designing organs-on-chips to create a scalable alternative for pharmaceutical drug testing on animals.

Last year, the company raised $4 million dollars in seed money. This year, it’s topping influential lists of small companies making big impacts.

Fast Company now lists it as one of “the 10 most innovative companies with fewer than 10 employees,”  saying “Vivodyne is helping major pharmaceutical companies like GlaxoSmithKline quickly adopt viable alternatives for testing drugs on monkeys.”

Vivodyne, launched in 2021, has created a platform that allows fully automated, complex studies at a far larger scale and lower cost than would be possible with manual experimentation, so pharmaceutical companies can actually test lab-made organs instead of animals in their drug-development processes. When done by hand, only 20 to 40 living tissue samples can be managed in parallel; Vivodyne’s instrument can cultivate, dose, and image more than 2,000 living tissues at once. The company, which raised $4 million in seed funding last year, says its instruments currently play pivotal roles in clinical drug testing for respiratory diseases, cancer treatment, vaccine development, diabetes therapies, and maternal medicine. GlaxoSmithKline, one of Vivodyne’s clients, estimates that for some projects the lab-grown tissues may displace as much as 80% of its animal testing. The company’s ultimate goal? “To supplant the vast majority of animal testing within the next decade,” says CEO Andrei Georgescu.

Continue reading “The 10 most innovative companies with fewer than 10 employees” at Fast Company.

Originally posted in Penn Engineering today.