TMC PULSE

t m c » p u l s e | j u n e 2 0 1 6 27 creative, and their pitches, for being done so quickly, were very professional." Chan mentioned he was "blown away" by the caliber of the products, pitches and presentations, and he was not expecting the level of thoughtfulness and intent that went into the design of the products. Meanwhile, his colleague, Sindha, thought the teams were mindful of who they were going to target and had an understanding of who the user would be and who the recipient would be. Another judge, William Cohn, M.D., a cardiolo- gist and director of the Center for Technology and Innovation at the Texas Heart Institute, a professor of surgery at Baylor College of Medicine and an adjunct professor of bioengineering at both Rice University and the University of Houston, said he was "amazed" by the fact that all of this was done over a weekend. "The individuals came in on a Friday, heard about what they needed to focus on and then came up with fully cooked presentations with business models, beautiful PowerPoint presentations and, in some cases, functioning prototypes," he added. "It really blew me away and spoke to the DNA in the room—these are bright, highly motivated folks, and it was inspiring and a wonderful thing to see." Following the event, four of the teams, including the winning team, announced that they were in the process of filing for provisional patents on their products. Next up for TMC Biodesign is preparing for its next class of fellows after selecting the eight fellows in May. THE M A K ING of a BIODESIGN FELLOW Our hope is that the companies that come out of Biodesign pursue other things within the TMC Innovation Institute and go broader into the Houston ecosystem. — SANDEEP BURUGUPALLI Business Strategist at TMC Biodesign B iodesign unites a group of indi- viduals from diverse backgrounds including engineering, medicine, business, computer science, design and research, to create two innovation tracks—digital health solutions and new devices—for unmet health care needs. The first class of fellows started last August and is nearing the home stretch of their yearlong program. Sandeep Burugupalli, TMC Biodesign business strategist, said they have made a lot of progress since that time. They completed the initial prototype-identifying stage, where they engaged with hospitals to find unmet needs, and now they are in the inventing stage, or the stage during which they are building out the solu- tion. The class will then move into the implementation stage that involves both teams starting companies and raising seed capital, and filing a patent for the medical device team. "Our hope is that the compa- nies that come out of Biodesign pursue other things within the TMC Innovation Institute and go broader into the Houston ecosystem," Burugupalli said. For the new class, Burugupalli and his team, including Farzad Soleimani, M.D., associate director of TMC Biodesign and assistant professor of emergency medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, and Sabah Pervez, a business associate with TMCx Accelerator, sifted through more than 600 applications. Pervez reached out to mentors and advisers for the event as well as mar- keted the application. She said a large number of applicants responded back within a day of the application going out. There was also a diverse mix of people and skill sets. "One of the applicants is a clinician who could take a break from his resi- dency, and he wants to use that break to be a fellow," she said. "That kind of passion from him and others made it a hard call to pick the finalists." They reduced those down to about 70 applicants and performed rounds of interviews and assigned them a case analysis, for which they could choose one of two health care needs to create a solution and the process they would take to commercialization. They could conduct case analysis on either the need to help emergency medical personnel get quicker access to patient health history or the need to prevent embolic stroke in patients with atrial fibrillation who have contraindications for anticoagulation, Soleimani said. "In a sense, we are trying to assess their research and analytical skills and to figure out how creative they are, how they can leverage design thinking and how collaborative they can be," Soleimani said. "Based on interviews and need analysis assignments, we could then see where the applicants fit in terms of their role as builder, researcher, organizer and/or scientist- clinician. We aim to recruit individuals with complementary skill sets as well as great chemistry to be part of the Biodesign fellow teams."

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