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Vanderbilt University signed a license agreement with PATH EX, Inc, a startup company dedicated to designing a system for preventing the onset of sepsis.
PATH EX, Inc was formed by Sinead Miller, PhD, a former graduate student in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and now Research Assistant Professor in that department. She launched the new startup company in 2017, and is getting substantial traction with regional entrepreneurial and investment communities.
The deal gives PATH EX, Inc, the right to explore the commercial possibility of using the patent pending extracorporeal blood cleansing device designed to selectively remove pathogens, including multi-drug resistant bacteria, and endotoxin from circulating blood, the root cause of sepsis.
PATH EX, Inc, is designing a novel system for removal of toxic materials from the blood of infected patients, thereby preventing the onset of sepsis. Sepsis is a major clinical problem, affecting over 1 million Americans per year and accounting for at least 250,000 deaths annually. Patients with sepsis are administered a variety of antibiotics without knowledge of which may treat the bacteria causing the underlying infection. This suboptimal treatment is pursued because the tests currently used to identify the specific bacteria take time to complete. The PATH EX product filters such bacteria out of the blood system, halting the onset or progression of sepsis.
During the course of Sinead’s Biomedical Engineering graduate education in the laboratory of Todd Giorgio at Vanderbilt University, she developed the inertial-based microfluidic device technology to remove bacteria and endotoxins from the blood, the root cause of sepsis. This technology was disclosed to CTTC in 2016 and we have since filed patent applications to protect the technology. "Working with Vanderbilt CTTC was great for PATH EX. CTTC encouraged and supported the formation of PATH EX, and ensured an efficient transfer of IP from Vanderbilt to PATH EX for commercial development,"said Sinead.
Additionally, she was a participant of the semester long IMPACT (Initiating, Maximizing, Promoting, and Accelerating Commercialization and Translation) class, organized by Vanderbilt Institute in Surgery and Engineering in collaboration with CTTC, aimed at helping engineering graduate students launch their own companies. During this course, which was based on the I-Corps curriculum, Sinead conducted more than 50 customer discovery interviews, which eventually lead her to the creation of the company, PATH EX, Inc. PATH EX was selected to the 2017 cohorts of ZeroTo510 medical device accelerator at Memphis Bioworks and won a $50,000 award. PATH EX also won several business pitch competitions including the student pitch competition at 38|86.