The Entrepreneurial vs Academic path example: Stanford engineers create wireless, self-propelled medical device

A typical scenario for a Visible Legacy Navigator user would be to be inspired by a news article of interest to use Navigator to find the papers, disclosures, and graduate students around the newsworthy innovations.  I'd like to use an example scenario to make note of the Entrepreneurial vs Academic career paths available to researchers and consider what influences deciding which road to take. 

February 22, 2012

Swimming through the blood stream: Stanford engineers create wireless, self-propelled medical device

For 50 years, scientists searched for the secret to making tiny implantable devices that could travel through the bloodstream. Engineers at Stanford have demonstrated just such a device. Powered without wires or batteries, it can propel itself though the bloodstream and is small enough to fit through blood vessels.


This is fascinating research, and I urge you to read the story at Stanford News.  You might also be interested to see the context in Visible Legacy Navigator as a user would, which you would find by typing "Ada Poon" in the Navigator search box and finding the news story (purple diamond) in the map.

I'd like to look at two paths diverging out of the one project called "Development of: Locomotive Micro Implant with Active Electromagnetic Propulsion".  Let's look at the first path, the spin-up of a company called EnteroWave:

The team of Drs. Anatoly Yakovlev and Daniel Pivonka are developing ways to use wireless technology with devices like catheters to deliver drugs or insert cameras.  Dr Yakovlev participated in a session with StartX.  They met up with Michael J. Partsch who has a track record of startups and venture contacts.  Mr Partsch in turn connected EnteroWave with Pankaj Jay Pasricha who was chief of gastroenterology at Stanford and now at Johns Hopkins.  Notable in this case is that Mike Partsch himself participated in a two-year fellowship with the Kauffman Foundation's Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership a decade ago. Mr Partsch has joined EnteroWave as Co-Founder and Business Manager.  The Kauffman Foundation is also a sponsor of the StartX program and is seeking to extend this model to other universities.   

Another path was taken by Dr Stephen D O'Driscoll who graduated three years earlier from the same program.  After work experience in large Silicon Valley companies, O'Driscoll completed his Stanford PhD and went on to the UC Davis Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering where he has been building his BioElectronics Lab working on analog and RF circuit design for biomedical and other power-constrained applications.

Startups keep academic ties and campus labs can be very entrepreneurial.  Exposing "future luminaries" to the options and helping them find the "best fit" is a key metric for success.  It may be a matter of personal goals, team chemistry, timing.  But having well-connected Professors and resources like StartX give researchers and collaborators more options.  

Serial startups on the DNA sequencing trail

In the last post, we looked at the widget for an emerging startup coming out of the intersection of Stanford engineering and medical innovations and concluded by asking the question does the widget convey the pedigree of the team at a glance. I hope you tried it out. Let's look at another company spinning up, does this widget tell the story?

We again find a pair of serial entrepreneurs, Drs. Malek Faham and Thomas Willis. A UCSF and Stanford team, they previously founded ParAllele which was acquired by Affymetrix for $120M. The related patents look a little dated (the blue bars for patents start with the patent filing and end with the patent issued, so we can see the long patent process). In fact, we can read the innovation disclosure from 1995 we see (the Red Diamond in the graph and red box in the timeline) which was re-released in Mar 2013 as available for licensing as described in the OTL Docket page (with the VL widget embedded!). Sequenta was founded in 2008 to develop a molecular diagnostics platform focused on immune system profiling taking advantage of recent innovations in next-generation DNA sequencing. They received $13M in venture funding in 2010 from Mohr Davidow Ventures, the same investor who funded ParAllele. 

You can explore the interactive widget by clicking the image above to drill into Dr Willis' background by clicking his orange node, then clicking "Navigate to ... Open in Visible Legacy Navigator" ... or just click the image below.  We see more about Dr Willis' collaborations

We find Professor Ronald W. Davis mentioned in several recent blogs, so we know that Sequenta can reach back into Stanford for resources and connections. The widget is a visual representation of the team's "About" page, but there is more context behind the story just a click away in Visible Legacy Navigator.

Guardant Health has a pedigree from Stanford EE and expertise in next-generation sequencing

Right in the middle of the map emerging between Ron Davis and Bruce Wooley (see previous post), we see Helmy Eltoukhy. Dr. Eltoukhy's PhD advisor was Dr. El Gamal.

Helmy Eltoukhy has gone on to become a serial entrepreneur and pioneer in the biotech industry. After receiving his PhD, MS and BS degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University, he joined the Stanford Genome Technology Center (SGTC) in 2006 to work on low-cost DNA sequencing technologies. At SGTC, he developed the first semiconductor sequencing platform and first base-calling algorithm for next-gen sequencing. In 2007, he co-founded Avantome to commercialize a low-cost, high-performance next-gen sequencing platform to seed the democratization of next-gen sequencing. As its founding CEO, he led Avantome through two rounds of financing and through acquisition by Illumina in 2008. At Illumina, Helmy was Sr Director of Advanced Technology Research, where he developed novel chemistries, hardware and informatics for genetic analysis systems.

Dr. Eltoukhy (PhD '06) has now partnered with Dr. Amir Ali Talasaz  to launch another company, Guardant Health to apply next-generation DNA sequencing technology to cancer detection.  Does this widget convey the pedigree of this collaboration?  We see two experienced entrepreneurs, recent patents, and a prior company sold to Illumina.  Click on the image below to explore the widget.

Stanford Integrated Circuits Lab as an innovation hub

We looked earlier at Genapsys at the intersection of Stanford engineering innovation and medical applications.  I used the new point-to-point feature to show the projects between Professor Ronald W. Davis, director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center and Professor Bruce Wooley who's lab is called the Mixed-Signal Circuits Group.  In the lower right is the Integrated Circuits Lab established in 1980 by James Meindl.  The ICL has had an impactful history offering unique opportunities to design and implement special purpose devices and integrated circuits that can be incorporated into prototype systems.  It appears to be an important hub of innovation.

In the connections between these two disciplines, there is activity to investigate around Professor Abbas El Gamal, and Professor Boris Murmann's Mixed Signal IC Design group is working with Professor Shan Wang on early cancer detection.  You can click the above image to open the interactive map in Visible Legacy Navigator.

Synthetic Biology: government funding transitions into startups

Using our new point-to-point feature, this map is an example of how to follow the progress of innovation from grant funding through the labs to emerging startups in an emerging field, in this case Synthetic Biology.  In 2006, the NSF funded the first synthetic biology engineering research center – Synberc – "to develop engineered biological systems that will catalyze new technologies for processing information, producing energy, manufacturing chemicals and pharmaceuticals and fabricating materials." Synberc is a consortium of UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, Stanford, Harvard and MIT.  In the VL map click the blue hexagon to see the callout which includes the direct link to Synberc or "Navigate To..." its map page. 

We can see in the above map that the synthetic biology effort at UC Berkeley has blossomed into their own Synthetic Biology Institute, generously funded by Agilent and others.  SBI's map is a hairball until we get some clustering going with papers and research topics! 

You will see another connection path between Stanford and UC Berkeley in the map above.  This connection shows the blue organization nodes for Gen9 and LS9, companies formed to translate synthetic biology research into gene synthesis and biofuels, respectively. Agilent recently invested in Gen9 and this looks like an excellent way for a large company to connect with a hub of experts and innovations in an agile, fast moving entrepreneurial firm.

Perhaps the Gen9 train has roared out of the station, but there are other ecosystems to explore where the cycle is repeating.  For example, in 2008 the NSF funded four "Expeditions in Computing" to pursue far-reaching research agendas that promise significant advances in the computing frontier and great benefit to society.  One of these expeditions, the Molecular Programming Project has led to an expanded expedition now called the Molecular Programming Architectures, Abstractions, Algorithms and Applications project.  See this project's map below.  This collaboration includes CalTech, University of Washington, Harvard, and UCSF.  Using navigational search you can find that the Microsoft Bio Computing Group is also involved, can you find it?  (Hint check the co-authors on the paper "Programmable Chemical Controllers made from DNA" :)  The University of Washington has just established its own Center for Synthetic Biology (in March, 2013, map and links).  It's just emerging, but given the ecosystem around the excellent UW Medical Center, this should be a great group to watch! 

SPRIE continues to flourish in the Stanford GSB

The Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE) moved from the Freeman Spogli Institute to the Graduate School of Business in 2011.  SPRIE has been continuing to flourish there under the continuing guidance of the directors William F. Miller and and Henry Rowen.  Professor Miller was the last faculty member recruited by Fred Terman, a story for another day.  The projects (green boxes) in SPRIE are all worth a look, including  "China 2.0: The Rise of a Digital Superpower", "Smart Green Cities", "Japanese Entrepreneurship", and "The Silicon Valley Project" (this is also an organization, so it's a small blue hexagon).  The Silicon Valley Project focuses on the dynamics, transformation and sustainability of Silicon Valley, and has a dream team for an advisory board.  With this powerhouse team, SPRIE is an ecosystem to watch.

View the widget at Visible Legacy...

GenapSys, another Stanford StartX success

GenapSys is another success out of the Stanford StartX program, this one in the life sciences arena and part of the new StartX Med focus.  Genapsys is developing an "easy-to-use genomic diagnostic system based on our simple label-free proprietary GENIUS™ technology".  GenapSys is interesting because the CEO is a multi-disciplinary problem innovator combining research insights from both Electrical Engineering and the Genome Center (see detail below, which you can get to by clicking the H. Esfandyarpour orange dot and click Navigate to ... Open in Navigator).  

I'd also like to note that Dr. Esfandyarpour's thesis advisor team included Prof. R. Fabian Pease, and we expected new outcomes from this hotspot as mentioned in a previous post.

View the widget at Visible Legacy...

Diffbot continues to grow, a Stanford StartX entrepreneurial success

Diffbot is a great Stanford entrepreneurial story.  The founder, Mike Tung came to Stanford to pursue his graduate degree after graduating from UC Berkeley in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.  He worked on projects in the Sebastian Thrun ecosystem such as image recognition "Smilifying Images", and Web Crawling Stanford Events.  He started working on something called Diffbot as a tool to help himself: it would send him alerts if the web pages for his courses changed.  This was a good idea for a company, and really got going as part of the Stanford StartX program that was just picking up steam.  Diffbot raised $2 million in May, 2012 and continues to release new features like the just-announced Product Pages API.

View the widget at Visible Legacy...