Five researchers from the University of Washington and Washington State University, Vancouver, working together with Washington companies, received a total of $376,454 in state funding through Washington Technology Center, according to an announcement today.  The university researchers are working with property data solutions company Data Data in Vancouver; biomaterials firm Healionics in Redmond; pressure instrumentation manufacturer Paine Electronics in East Wenatchee; nanostructure material builder Modumetal in Seattle; and medical simulator developer Simulab, also in Seattle.

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Jeff Carbeck walked away from a promising career in academia four years ago to co-found Arsenal Medical, to apply advances in materials science to the healthcare market. Carbeck and I talked last week about his work at Watertown, MA-based Arsenal (originally named WMR Biomedical), which Xconomy reported last week raised $8.2 million in a third round of venture capital. In addition to the advances in biomaterials development at the firm, we discussed his recent award of a fellowship with the New England Clean Energy Council.

Carbeck, who is also chief scientist at Cambridge, MA-based nanotech research firm Nano-Terra, is not as recognized in the Boston area as some of his Arsenal co-founders, such as Harvard’s George Whitesides or MIT inventor Bob Langer. Still, Carbeck is very much on the leading edge of translating discoveries in material science for use in medical products, clean technology, and a variety of other disciplines. (Nano-Terra, in fact, is open to tackling R&D challenges in multiple industries except for life sciences.)

He’s also one of the top chemical engineers to come out of the Harvard lab of Whitesides, the chairman and initial inventor at Nano-Terra. (Whitesides’ other protégés include North Bridge Venture Partners general partner Carmichael Roberts and John Rogers, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.)

At Arsenal, Carbeck oversees development of biomedical devices in the fields of cardiology and ophthalmology. He guarded some of the fine details of the products under development, but he shed new light on some of the problems they hope to solve.

The startup is developing devices with materials that can treat arterial disease at the molecular and cellular level—rather than simply dealing with the problem mechanically with an arterial stent to prop open clogged arteries. It’s also studying materials that could deliver drugs to different regions of the eye. The company is exploring multiple other medical uses for proprietary materials at the firm, he says. Interestingly, Arsenal was not founded around a specific technology, yet subsequent to its launch has developed its own materials and gained rights to other technologies from Langer’s lab at MIT as well as research institutions not affiliated with the firm.

“I guess I see the world through the eyes of a …Next Page »

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In 1996, I received a $40M+, 11-year grant from the National Science Foundation to launch University of Washington Engineered Biomaterials (UWEB). UWEB focused on the biomaterials used to make medical devices and medical diagnostics. Medical devices and diagnostics are estimated to be a $150B+ endeavor. Though devices manufactured by the medical industry save lives and improve the quality of life for millions, there are significant issues that impede device performance and increase costs to the healthcare system and the patient. These issues include blood clotting, infection, poor healing, fouling, mineralization, degradation, and scarring. UWEB approached these compelling problems though collaborative, interdisciplinary teams that included engineers, materials scientists, chemists, biologists, physicians, and dentists.

The research program addressed issues confronting biomaterials and medical devices with an eye toward the needs of patients and the industry. In 11 years, UWEB revolutionized implant healing, developed new strategies to address calcification, evolved fouling-resistant surfaces, proposed new blood compatible surfaces, invented approaches to reduce infection on biomaterials, and invented drug delivery strategies. Also, UWEB expanded its scope to include tissue engineering (heart, esophagus, bladder, cornea, bone, cartilage, etc.). UWEB innovations led to at least 6 spin-off companies, including Asemblon and Healionics. Finally, a generation of students was trained in understanding modern biomaterials and also how industry works. These students now fill numerous positions in major companies, research labs, hospitals, and universities.

It’s time to take the next step and get industry more directly involved. UWEB-21 will take UWEB and expand it to the next level—a program to address needs for 21st-century biomaterials. My proposal is that UWEB laboratories and scientists will partner with UWEB-21 consortium companies to provide analytical services, to collaborate on research and device development, to pursue funding opportunities, to review IP licensing opportunities, and to assist with recruitment and training.

So I’m looking to the community for involvement and commitment. UWEB-21 is now seeking partners in our industrial consortium. Partnership is the key concept—all players reap rewards. The Puget Sound region has numerous medical device and diagnostics companies. The resources and expertise available at the University of Washington are widely acknowledged to be among the best in the world. UWEB-21 is set up to offer real value to companies partnering with this program. If you join UWEB-21, you will help support Washington as a world center for biomaterials and also open new resources for your company. For further information, write to me at: ratner@uweb.engr.washington.edu.

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When I stopped by Buddy Ratner’s office at the University of Washington yesterday, he looked like a proud papa. He had just gotten word that the National Science Foundation, in a report to Congress, is using one of his group’s companies, Healionics, as an example of a successful biomedical startup. Here at Xconomy, we’ve come across Healionics quite a bit recently, as mentioned to us by the Technology Alliance’s Susannah Malarkey, and as funded by a Washington Technology Center research grant.

Ratner, a professor of bioengineering (and an Xconomist), showed me the laudatory “nugget” from the NSF report, which calls Healionics a “most promising” biotech firm based on “highly innovative, cross-disciplinary” research, and an “excellent example” of how to transfer innovative biomedical technology to industry. “Healionics is poised to enter the emerging and potentially very large international market for biomaterials that enhance the biocompatibility and performance of implanted medical devices,” the report reads.

Founded in 2007, Redmond, WA-based Healionics is one of a half-dozen companies spun out of the University of Washington Engineered Biomaterials (UWEB) center, an 11-year, $40 million effort funded by NSF that finished up last year. Its main objective was to spur innovation by addressing the problems of medical devices (a $100 billion-plus industry) and how they heal in the body—and NSF looks to be satisfied with the results. “They want to show Congress there is impact from the money they’re investing,” says Ratner, the director of UWEB.

The technology of Healionics began as a Ph.D. research project in Ratner’s lab around 2000. Every year, says Ratner, some 50,000 people in the U.S. die from catheter-related infections, and more broadly there are about 325,000 complaints about biocompatibility of medical devices. When a foreign object is inserted through the skin, the body’s natural defenses form a capsule of tissue around it or work to eject it, which wreaks havoc with any device’s operation and can cause infection. So Ratner and his student Andrew Marshall came up with a type of biomaterial that could be used to coat an implanted device and help it integrate better with the body’s tissues.

The key to the material is giving it lots of pores—holes that interact with the body’s cells and through which blood vessels and tissue can grow. It turns out there is an optimal size for the pores too, about 35 micrometers, or half the diameter of a human hair. Any bigger or smaller, and the healing properties aren’t as good. “We found a sweet spot,” Ratner says.

In turn, Healionics seems to have found a sweet spot in its business model. The company, led by CEO Robert Brown, a nine-year Microsoft veteran with an M.B.A. from UW, uses its porous-biomaterial technology to improve other companies’ medical devices, but doesn’t market any products of its own. As a result, it collects royalties on other companies’ sales without having to invest in expensive R&D or new clinical trials, so it can get by on smaller amounts of funding. Healionics has about 10 contracts with other companies, including TRBioSurgical, an Arizona-based biomaterials firm that is developing a glaucoma implant for veterinary use.

Ratner, who serves as chair of Healionics’ science advisory board, seems excited about the startup’s longer-term prospects. “They’re very successful,” he says of the company. But he’s always thinking bigger. His next step? Putting together a consortium of biotech and biomedical companies that will collaborate with UW and help fund R&D in materials, devices, and tissue engineering—and just maybe speed up the innovation chain that much more.

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