By Susan Kelley, Cornell Chronicle January 21, 2025

Cornell engineers are aiming to create a big leap in vascular grafts, used to combat cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death worldwide.

The biodegradable graft looks like a tough, stretchy straw. It not only expands and contracts like veins and arteries do as blood pumps through it. The graft is also biodegradable – it allows new vascular cells to grow in and around it as the body absorbs it. The team is hoping to improve the current vascular graft technology, which is only applicable for vessels larger than 5 millimeters.

“Every year, between end-stage renal disease and cardiovascular disease, there are millions of people suffering and dying. There is not a viable treatment option for a lot of these patients. And we think our technology can become that,” said Anthony D’Amato, a former postdoctoral researcher in the lab of biological engineer and professor Yadong Wang, where the synthetic graft is being developed.

Wang and D’Amato are co-founders of Anova Biomedical.

The materials used to repair cardiovascular structures have basically remained the same since the 1960s, said Wang, the McAdam Family Foundation Professor of Heart Assist Technology at Cornell Engineering.

“The current technology is good enough for certain applications,” Wang said. “It’s definitely not good enough for all.”

With the help of Cornell’s venture incubation ecosystem, Anova has hit several milestones. “It would have been a lot harder” without Cornell’s assistance, Wang said.

The Center for Technology Licensing awarded D’Amato $180,000 in 2022 through its Ignite Fellow for New Ventures program. He was in the first cohort of the initiative, which offers Cornell researchers a one-year training program to learn how to create and run a start-up and commercialize technologies that come out of faculty labs.

“The idea is to accelerate and facilitate the commercialization of Cornell technology into new start-ups and keep the researchers involved in them,” D’Amato said. So far, Anova has licensed 11 patents from the Wang lab, including intellectual property in composition, design and manufacturing.

After D’Amato graduated from the Ignite program in July 2024, he became Anova’s CEO.

That’s also when a collaboration between Anova and Cornell was awarded a $65,000 manufacturing grant from FuzeHub, a not-for-profit that supports small and medium-sized manufacturing companies in New York state.

Cornell’s Center for Life Science Ventures, a residential startup incubator on the Ithaca campus, admitted Anova to its ranks two months later, in September 2024.

That assistance has helped Anova create the fourth iteration of its graft design. The material, an elastomer, springs back into shape after it is stretched, but is also very strong. “I literally cannot break it,” Wang said. “It’s a very, very tough material.”

The Cornell support has helped catalyze other national and regional funding. The National Science Foundation awarded Anova a $275,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant to fund a one-year project to further develop a 3D printing resin in August 2024.

And in October 2024, Anova beat out 12 other startups to win first place and a $150,000 investment in the FuzeHub Commercialization Competition at the New York State Innovation Summit.

A 25-year journey

Wang began working on the technology in 2000, as a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of his adviser, Robert Langer ’70, the most cited engineer in history and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A surgeon, Dr. Jay Vacanti, had asked Langer to create a biodegradable material with elasticity that could be used to repair the liver. Langer pointed to Wang and said, “Ask him!”

So Wang set to work.

“But once I made the material, I thought, ‘OK, what’s the most demanding environment where this elastomer can really shine, where the current material may not be good enough?’” Wang said. “That’s when I started working on blood vessels.”

Structurally, the material is a metallo-elastomer – a polymer that is similar to natural rubber and composed of molecules that behave like random coils. When the elastomer is exposed to metal ions, the random coils bind together. The elastomer then behaves like a three-dimensional fishing net – and mimics the natural elasticity of arteries and veins.

“You can pull on it, and it will extend,” Wang said. “But the minute the force goes away, because it is tied down by these knots, it will go back to the original shape.”

When a person has a blocked artery, the first option is to implant a stent or to take a vein or artery from their leg and use it to replace the clogged one. That comes with its own problems.

For example, when D’Amato’s father needed an emergency bypass during heart surgery, doctors had to very quickly cut his leg open and take out a vein graft.

It saved his life – but there were down sides that prompted D’Amato to join Wang’s lab.

“His leg didn’t heal. He still limps,” D’Amato said. “Ten years later, he has a tremendous amount of scarring, and he’s not an active person. And he was relatively healthy. You know, if this happens with a diabetic or a very old person, it could be much worse.”

If a graft from the patient is unavailable, surgeons can insert a graft – like a hollow wire –made of Teflon, the same material used to coat nonstick pans and waterproof jackets.

But grafts are very stiff compared to arteries, and the mismatch creates a lot of problems. “So what happens at the junction between the stiff tube and the soft tube?” Wang said. “There’s a lot of tension there, so that creates inflammation and scarring over time. So it closes down again.”

That’s why grafts fail about 20% to 70% of the time, depending on the location of the implant.

Moreover, grafts don’t work well in areas where arteries are smaller than 5 millimeters in diameter, like below the knee. “You hear about diabetics getting their feet amputated,” D’Amato said. “That’s because there’s no good option to bypass below the knee.”

Not only does Anova’s material expand and contract as blood flows through, it also will degrade in 9-12 months as a new blood vessel regenerates in its place.

“So we don’t have to worry about this foreign material staying in the body forever, creating inflammation, causing a risk of thrombus and clot formation, causing this mechanical mismatch that causes all these other problems,” D’Amato said.

Although the eventual goal is to use the graft in cardiac patients, the first application will be for dialysis patients. They either get teflon grafts, or surgeons join an artery to a vein to create a loop where the blood can be directed to the dialysis machine, then pumped back into the body. That method fails within a year 60% of the time, D’Amato said.

“When you talk to people going through dialysis, they say it’s like torture,” he said. “They’re nearing end of life and they’re suffering, and it’s a huge time commitment. It’s very painful for them, emotionally and physically.”

An experiment in March will help Anova lock the graft’s final design.

Assistance from CTL and Cornell’s incubator network has helped Anova get to that point, Wang said.

“They’ve helped us refine our idea, connect us to advisers who understand the regulatory path and who have brought companies from the seed and startup stage to maturity or to an exit,” Wang said. “So we learned a lot just through this engagement with this community.”

By Blaine Friedlander, Cornell Chronicle

A company that originated in Syracuse and is aiming to use agricultural waste to replace the petroleum-based plastic liners in coffee cups, takeout containers and other consumer products has joined Cornell’s Center for Life Science Ventures incubator.

RETRN Bio joined the incubator June 1 to conduct research and polish a business plan, with the objective of decreasing the world’s dependency on plastic.

Photo: Chris Thomas, the CEO of RETRN Bio, (left), Juan Hinestroza, the Rebecca Q. Morgan ’60 Professor of Fiber Science and Apparel Design in the College of Human Ecology, and Ryan Scheel, the chief science officer of RETRN Bio, discuss how to upcycle agricultural waste streams and process them into biodegradable polymers.

“We want to confront chemical pollution by helping the paper-packaging industry displace outdated plastics with a new class of biodegradable coatings for food containers,” said Chris Thomas, CEO of RETRN Bio.

“We want to replace that small amount of plastic now found on paper materials with a waste-based, tunable polymer fiber that will be recyclable, fully biodegradable and completely natural,” Thomas said. “It can be broken down quickly in the environment without adding to our pollution problem.”

The incubator will provide laboratory space for the company, business-plan development expertise and a wide array of campus research resources – including academic knowledge.

“RETRN Bio is finding a way to make their green plastic in a flexible manner to meet a variety of industrial and commercial needs,” said Lou Walcer, director of the Center for Life Science Ventures. “The specs for every product will be different, but whether you’re manufacturing a coffee cup or a takeout dinner tray, the bioplastic lining must be flexible enough to accommodate the process.”

RETRN Bio uses low-cost agricultural waste – such as plant-based, fibrous wheat bran left over from breweries, or papermill excess – to bioengineer and create natural, proprietary PHA (polyhydroxyalkanoate) polymers that can be adjusted for different uses and manufacturing processes.

“Anything that originally came from a plant can be used because it is fiber-rich,” Thomas said. “The integrity and structural fibers of plants is what we use as our base material.”

Currently, food-container makers generally use polyethylene (PE) or perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS), and other plastics, to line packaging.

But about three years ago, Thomas and Ryan Scheel, now the chief science officer for RETRN Bio, imagined a better source: biological components. They sought to turn agricultural waste – such as gigantic piles of fibrous bran leftovers from the brewing process – into bioplastic by using bacteria.

As students at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Thomas and Scheel took their concept to the Blackstone LaunchPad program at Syracuse University.

Last fall, through the Cornell Center for Materials Research, RETRN Bio partnered with Juan Hinestroza, the Rebecca Q. Morgan ’60 Professor of Fiber Science and Apparel Design in the College of Human Ecology, and his students to refine how to upcycle agricultural waste streams and process them into biodegradable polymers.

Hinestroza is a faculty fellow at Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. Funding came from the JumpStart program, which supports small business in New York, while working with Empire State Development’s Division of Science, Technology and Innovation (NYSTAR).

“RETRN Bio not only has a solid scientific background,” Hinestroza said, “but an unshakable commitment to provide real solutions to solve the massive problem of plastic pollution.

“Working with them has been a great experience,” he said. “My students in the Department of Human Centered Design benefit by seeing how fiber science knowledge and skills can provide unique solutions to global challenges.”

Walcer said the goal for RETRN Bio is to earn outside investment and achieve self-sufficiency, while developing jobs in the life sciences and bringing economic development to New York.

“It’s all about scale,” Walcer said. “RETRN Bio will be here at the Center for Life Science Ventures to take their laboratory bench-scale processes, use our lab facilities, scale it up, make it into an industrial-strength process and greenify everybody’s coffee cup and many other consumer products.”

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kanvas-biosciences-announces-12-million-pre-series-a-to-accelerate-microbiome-drug-development-301857507.html?tc=eml_cleartime

R&D breakthrough for microbiome-associated therapies: Technology brings breakthrough resolution and context to host-microbiome interactions

PRINCETON, N.J., June 22, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Kanvas Biosciences, the leader in microbiome mapping technology, announced today a $12M Pre-Series A funding round. The investment will be used to further advance the company’s proprietary platform technology, which promises to revolutionize drug development for microbiome-associated diseases. The round was led by DCVC with participation from Lions Capital LLC, Cooke LLC, Uncommon Denominator, and Triple Impact Capital. As part of the investment round, Jason Pontin, partner at DCVC, will join the company’s board of directors.

The interactions between the microbiome and its host are critical to human health. The current gold standard for analyzing these interactions is to extract a sample, blend it, and sequence the genetic material in the sample. This strategy enables broad inferences about the composition of the sample, but little more, as information regarding biospatial localization and cellular function is lost in the process.To overcome this challenge, Kanvas has developed a revolutionary technology platform that enables highly multiplexed spatial profiling of microbial species. The platform not only determines the identity and function of these microbes, but also maps the host’s corresponding local response – all executed within a single, comprehensive assay.

With Kanvas’ proprietary technology, based on research first published in Nature by the company’s founders, researchers can profile both the microbiome and the host cells with sub-cellular resolution to provide critical context and unparalleled insight into complex host-microbe interactions. This platform can be applied to the discovery and development of novel, live biotherapeutic products, the identification of disease-associated microbes for diagnostics, and leveraging the microbiome to improve therapeutic responses.

“Our technology takes the gastrointestinal tract and the microbiome from black box to transparent and measurable terrain,” says Kanvas Biosciences co-founder and CEO Matthew Cheng, MD. “We are thrilled to drive forward the development of life-saving treatments for some of the world’s most common conditions.” While the microbiome has long been associated with inflammatory bowel disease and colon cancer, emerging data indicate its intimate connection to a range of conditions beyond the gastrointestinal tract, including cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders, and response to cancer immunotherapy treatments.

The raised capital will be used towards expanding Kanvas’ proprietary single-cell spatial transcriptomics platform and launching biological and R&D discovery platforms. To this end, Kanvas has already established partnerships with leading biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies.

“This breakthrough technology empowers researchers to explore microbial communities in unprecedented ways, with profound implications for the health and biomedical industries. It fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human microbiome, allowing us to consider it as a distinct and druggable organ, opening uncharted territories in medicine,” said Jason Pontin of DCVC.

About Kanvas Biosciences
Kanvas Biosciences is building the world’s first microbiome drug screening and drug discovery platform to accelerate live biotherapeutic product (LBP) development. Leveraging its unparalleled ability to spatially map the microbiome and profile host-gene expression at single-cell resolution, the company is constructing the most comprehensive and robust microbiome data resource for future drug development. Kanvas Biosciences’ technology was initially developed at Cornell University and exclusively licensed. The company’s notable investors include DCVC, Lions Capital LLC, Cooke LLC, Uncommon Denominator, and Triple Impact Capital. The company is headquartered in Monmouth Junction, NJ.

SOURCE Kanvas Biosciences

By J. Edward Anthony 

CareTech Human, a startup developing a device to monitor urological symptoms at home, is joining Cornell’s Center for Life Science Ventures business incubator.

Many patients are accustomed to the benefits and convenience of at-home monitoring of blood pressure, blood glucose levels and other critical health metrics. CareTech Human aims to make it just as easy for patients to gather quantitative data about their urological health.

“Urological conditions are thought to affect as many or more people than diabetes. But when it comes to monitoring urological disease, nothing is available to patients or health care providers similar to at-home blood pressure monitors or glucometers,” says Dan Matsui, founder and CEO of CareTech Human.

The company is developing a small device that users can install above the waterline in their toilet bowl. The proprietary system, which combines the toilet-installed device with cloud-based machine-learning algorithms, continuously gathers diagnostically relevant measures of volume, frequency, flow and urgency. In the future, the company intends to expand the system’s diagnostic functionality with electronic nose technology to detect biomarkers in urine.

“We’re developing something similar to a smoke detector or a check engine light. It’s all about automation, convenience and continuous measurement – a passive tracking of health parameters that is hygienic and contactless,” Matsui says.

Urological symptoms – such as a sudden and intense need to urinate, difficulty beginning to urinate and waking multiple times at night to urinate – affect millions of adults in the U.S. and many more worldwide. These symptoms often arise from benign conditions such as overactive bladder (OAB) and benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH, or enlarged prostate). Even benign conditions may require treatment, however, and similar symptoms may indicate more serious urological diseases.

CareTech Human’s platform uses a secure internet connection to send objective, quantitative data to a patient’s authorized health care provider.

Doctors today generally rely on self-reporting to evaluate a patient’s urological health and assess their response to treatment. A patient may be asked to complete a short survey or to maintain a voiding diary over a period of weeks or months. Self-reporting methods are subjective and imprecise, and they rely on the patient to consistently record data. In-office quantitative uroflowmetry diagnostics require clinical infrastructure and are limited by a single assessment in an unfamiliar clinical setting that may not capture a patient’s typical symptoms.

Matsui hopes that the company’s system will eventually help doctors identify severe urological disorders and provide timely treatments that can improve patient outcomes and avoid medical emergencies and costly emergency room visits.

CareTech Human emerged from the eō Business Incubators in Ukraine, an entrepreneurship program founded by Charles K. Whitehead ’83, the Myron C. Taylor Alumni Professor of Business Law. Since CareTech Human graduated from the eō program in 2021, the company has continued to advance its technology through research and prototyping.

The Center for Life Science Ventures will provide CareTech Human with a New York state operations base, access to Cornell’s expertise in health technology and other resources, and mentorship and guidance on entering the U.S. market.

“Big ideas combined with great execution are rare, and well worth seeking out from around the world. That’s why we’re very happy to welcome CareTech Human to Cornell,” said Lou Walcer ’74, director of the Center for Life Science Ventures.

Source: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2023/06/turning-toilets-health-monitors-startup-joins-life-science-business-incubator

 

By Caitlin Hayes, Cornell Chronicle January 10, 2023

In 2014, Charles K. Whitehead ’83, the Myron C. Taylor Alumni Professor of Business Law, was invited to lecture at a premier university in Ukraine – a country that many in the U.S., at that time, might not have been able to locate on a map.

But Whitehead found the country fascinating. As the son of a U.S. diplomat, he had visited Ukraine as a child, when it was part of the Soviet Union, and he returned in 2014 just after protesters had ousted a Russia-backed president and installed a new government.

It was a country in transition, Whitehead said.

“Ukraine was fascinating, a place where the historical dynamics were Russian, Soviet, but the people were looking to the West to develop a new economy, a new platform for business, and a new social infrastructure,” said Whitehead, who specializes in business and finance law at Cornell Law School. “I met Ukrainians all over the country who were clearly entrepreneurial and thoughtful, with new ideas and research, but what they lacked was an understanding of Western business and the ability to position themselves for investors.”

In 2019, after repeated visits to the country, including on a Fulbright grant, Whitehead founded eō Business Incubators with the help of Ukraine-born Felix Litvinsky, managing director of Cornell’s Blackstone LaunchPad, and a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Competitive Economy Program in Ukraine. With physical locations in Kyiv and Kharkiv and providing support nationwide, the incubator gives Ukrainian startup founders the skills and positioning to attract national and global investment.

Through the COVID-19 pandemic – and now the war – the incubator has supported more than 100 startups, valued collectively at close to $110 million. The teams have brought in approximately $10 million in investment and earn around $1.5 million in annual revenue. And incubator graduates have won every major Ukrainian national competition as well as numerous international contests, taking the $100,000 grand prize at the Dubai 2020 global startup competition and excelling at Web Summit (Portugal) and the Consumer Electronics Show (Las Vegas), two of the world’s largest technology conferences.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, the incubation program has expanded, pivoting back to the online format it used at the height of the pandemic.

“They’re committed,” Litvinsky said about the incubator teams. “Through thick and thin, they’re doing everything possible to grab that value, that knowledge, because they’re looking forward. The soldiers are on the front lines, and our teams are working so that when the war ends, we have a foundation, and we can rebuild.”

Building lasting relationships

The eō – Latin for “to go,” “to prepare,” “to advance” – incubation program typically spans 16 weeks and involves a six-day bootcamp covering the fundamentals of launching a startup, followed by weekly lectures, trainings and meetings with mentors, and a demo day where startups can pitch to each other, and to investors and potential partners. Teams are usually matched with two mentors, experienced entrepreneurs from all over the world – including many from Cornell – who can provide each startup with expertise tailored to their development stage and product.

Dan Matsui, Ukrainian founder of the startup CareTech Human, participated in the incubator last winter, just months before the Russian invasion. He said the program helped him clarify and describe the value of his product – an at-home device that aids in early disease detection.

“There are a lot of specifics: how people like information to be presented, how should we structure timing, how to pitch to present your value correctly,” Matsui said. “In describing our product, we can be super technical but the business presentation – that’s been our weak part.”

Matsui said the connections and mentorship have been essential and have provided specialized knowledge and contacts in the U.S., where he hopes to solicit investors and bring his device to market. He also hopes to deepen ties with Cornell; he visited the Ithaca campus in December to meet with Louis Walcer ’74, director of the Center for Life Science Ventures, for consultation on an application to Cornell’s incubator for life sciences startups.

“We’re super grateful to the United States,” Matsui said. “And my connections here are very helpful. From each meeting, we learn more about how to position a product, how to pitch it, where we can mitigate risks, and what areas to pay attention to.”

The relationships built in the incubator are meant to last, Litvinsky said. “We continue to support every single individual who went through eō,” he said. “And we have to give so much credit to the Ukrainians who are looking forward to victory and the opportunities ahead.”

Adapting to war

When the war began, Matsui, with his wife and four-month-old twins, fled Ukraine for Poland, but they returned to Kyiv in May. Aside from pauses due to blackouts, he said his team of about 10 people are working as fast and as hard as ever, while devoting time outside work to volunteer for the war effort.

Litvinsky and Whitehead spent the first days of the war frantically working from the U.S. to ensure their Ukrainian staff and teams were safe, providing information to those fleeing or in shelters and helping to procure medical supplies. Once the invasion slowed, they were able to pivot the incubation program online – they’d already made the transition once for the pandemic – and the cohort they’re working with now is the largest yet, with 32 teams initially enrolled.

Some things in the program have changed; frequent blackouts and air raids have required flexibility from the once-strict attendance policy. In online sessions, one participant keeps an AK-47 on hand in case of attack; others sometimes log in from dark rooms as they wait for electricity to be restored. Still more have left Ukraine and are logging in from different time zones. Whitehead visited Kyiv in October, when a Russian cruise missile struck just 300 meters from his hotel, and again in December during Russia’s then-largest missile attack since the start of the war.

Despite the dangers and complexities, the program’s success and flexible format have made it attractive to other countries as well. “For the same reason we’re able to pivot because of the war, we can also fairly easily move into other areas,” Whitehead said. “In Ukraine, eō’s success has shown others in the region who might think about a startup economy, and also global investors, that building this kind of ecosystem makes sense.”

Whitehead and Litvinsky have begun a program in Moldova, another nonNATO country bordering Ukraine, and have been approached by contacts in Georgia and Poland.

Back home, Whitehead used his experience developing the incubator to help design the Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship program at Cornell Tech in 2019. In 2020, he was selected by Ukraine’s Minister of Finance to serve on the supervisory board of a new national Ukrainian Startup Fund, which provides small grants to tech startups. He has also lectured across Ukraine, as well as worked with Ukrainian government officials to assist in setting up new financial and business platforms.

“Rarely do you get a chance to put into practice the things you research and lecture about,” Whitehead said. “Our work in Ukraine has given me that opportunity.” 

Plans are also in the works for eō Business Incubators to launch a venture capital fund devoted to Ukraine even before the war comes to an end.

The incubation program may have even more impact in Ukraine in the years to come, Whitehead said. “It teaches a way to think differently, to build business, to connect outside of Ukraine. These were all good things before the war,” he said. “In post-war Ukraine, this will go from being valuable to becoming fundamental.”

By Blaine Friedlander, Cornell Chronicle

November 18, 2022