Research & Ideas
Graduate Students Take Prize for Project on Artificial Arteries

For their work on creating new forms of artificial arteries, a team of UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco graduate students took the first place prize along with $10,000 in a competition held at UCSF last month.

The team won the prize in the second annual Global Life Science Innovation Competition, an event hosted by the UCSF Center for BioEntrepreneurship.

After presenting their project, which included a business plan for the medical device they had developed, the team, along with seven others, was evaluated by a panel of 18 judges representing venture capitalists, investors, law firms and pharmaceutical and biotechnological companies.

The competition was organized by the UCSF center and sponsored by organizations interested in the life sciences with the aim of bringing academics and industry closer together, said Craig Hashi, leader of the winning team and graduate student at the UC Berkeley bioengineering department.

The winning project, called Vasotech, pursues uses for artificial arteries made with stem cells that are taken from the patient.

Having the stem cells taken from the patient is advantageous because it would reduce the immunological rejection of transplanted tissues that plagues many operations today.

In the current phase of the project, adult stem cells are collected from the bone marrow of rats and then put onto sheets of synthetic fibrils, resembling the natural environment for vascular cells, Hashi said.

After a week, the sheets are rolled up into a tiny tube and inserted in the patient—at this stage a rat. The tube will then develop into a viable blood vessel.

The artificial vessels could prove to be the solution for people with peripheral vascular disease or coronary artery disease, Hashi said.

Other team members from the bioengineering department at UC Berkeley include Kyle Kurpinski and Randall Janairo. The team also included Katie Filaski, Rebecca Botelho and Liam Holt from UCSF.

Kurpinski, who focused on the business plan for the project, said the biggest challenges in this plan were to determine how to market a product like this and to come up with a strategic plan on how to put the cell-based technology into production.

However, he said the competition was useful to learn how to start a business based on a new technology with potential, Kurpinski said.

The team started working on their project as a class project in the “Idea to IPO ... and Beyond” class taught at the UCSF center, he said.

The second-place winner in the competition was another UC Berkeley- based team called Parada Imaging. This team won for their work on developing a low-cost MRI scanner, so that Magnetic Resonance Imaging can become widely available. Parada Imaging also tied for first place in the UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition earlier this year.

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