Entrepreneurial Training Program Helps Researchers Identify Commercial Potential of Their Work

Inés Maldonado Lasunción, a Ph.D. candidate and research associate at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, is working on a wearable device to monitor childhood absence epilepsy — brief seizures characterized by staring spells during which the child is unaware and nonresponsive.

Her noninvasive, nondiagnostic approach, Maldonado Lasunción says, would help track a child’s progress over the course of a new treatment, during different daily activities, or throughout their development.

She sees value in a device like this and has co-founded a company called MindSEED to develop and commercialize it. That’s why Maldonado Lasunción and her team partner Jeffrey Peterson, along with nine other teams of researchers, recently took part in the I-Corps@NCATS Regional Short Course, an entrepreneurial research training program offered by UM.

The program was led by Suhrud Rajguru, Ph.D., an associate professor of biomedical engineering and otolaryngology, who was joined by Robert Storey, a national instructor for both the National Science Foundation’s and National Institutes of Health’s I-Corps programs; Molly Wasko, Ph.D., professor and associate dean at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Collat School of Business and the UAB I-Corps program director; and Norma Kenyon, Ph.D., chief innovation officer at the Miller School and UM’s vice provost for innovation.

Developed through a collaboration of nine Clinical and Translational Science Award hubs, including the University of Miami’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute, the I-Corps@NCATS program aims to accelerate the development and commercialization of new products, services, medical devices, diagnostics and therapeutics arising from ongoing biomedical research and educational projects.

Through five weeks of group exercises, didactic lectures, and one-on-one coaching from instructors, team members use the customer discovery process to form their business thesis. A business model canvas is used to map out who their key customers are, how their company will create value, and how it will generate revenue in a way that is sustainable.

“The best way to test and validate the business model, to identify value, is by going outside of our clinics, laboratories, and classrooms to talk to potential customers about their actual needs,” Dr. Rajguru said.

“One of the biggest takeaways for me was learning to visualize the workflow that occurs from the moment a patient arrives at the clinic to when they would need our device, and all the people involved at each step,” Maldonado Lasuncion said. “If we don’t anticipate all the variables before launching the product, we will find many unpredicted problems along the way to commercialization.”

Another participant, Dileep Yavagal, M.D., professor of clinical neurology and neurological surgery, said, “Our participation in the course was tremendously beneficial for our discovery phase of developing a catheter-based delivery system for biologics. As a physician-scientist with no entrepreneurial experience, I found the course to be an eye-opener. The emphasis on the interviewing process allowed us to determine the magnitude of the need for our delivery system, and who our true customers are.”

The I-Corps program was originally developed in 2012 by the National Science Foundation. Since then, more than 2,000 research teams have trained, and hundreds of startup companies have been formed and launched. The I-Corps@NCATS curriculum is specific to innovations in life sciences and is available to CTSA hubs across the network.

The I-Corps@NCATS Regional Short Course at UM is supported in part by the National Center For Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number UL1TR002736. It is co-sponsored by the University of Miami College of Engineering and U Innovation.

To learn more about future I-Corps@NCATS events, join the CTSI listserv.

Tags: Clinical and Translational Science Institute, Dileep Yavagal, I-Corps@NCATS Regional Short Course, Inés Maldonado Lasunción