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Get the most interesting and important stories from the University of Pittsburgh.Every year, nearly 100,000 people in the United States die from overdoses, and many of these deaths are related to opioids.
“To put it into perspective, that’s two Heinz Fields’ worth of people who die every year from opioid overdoses,” said Trent Emerick, associate professor in the departments of anesthesiology, perioperative medicine and bioengineering. Along with appointments in the School of Medicine and Swanson School of Engineering, he directs Pitt’s Pain Medicine Fellowship Program.
Emerick has a host of tools at his disposal when it comes to treating pain, but some of the most effective — and most intrusive — methods come with a host of side effects and potential complications.
“I wanted to develop something a little longer lasting than a nerve block, but not something as risky as the permanent implants that have a lot of risks and side effects,” Emerick said. With the help of two Swanson School of Engineering researchers, he came up with a solution: “a bioabsorbable, or biodegradable, nerve stimulator.”
The invention has earned the researchers multiple internal grants, which yielded enough preliminary research to secure National Institutes of Health funding. The team earned a Helping End Addiction Long term (HEAL) grant as well as a Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) award, which required the team to start a company so they could bring their final product to market.
“We call it Vanish Therapeutics Inc. because [the stimulator] dissolves in the body.”
Finding what works for persistent pain
When pain persists for three months, it’s classified as chronic. At that point, “The spinal cord and brain can become overactivated and the pain itself starts to take on a life of its own outside of the original site of tissue injury,” Emerick said. As the pain worsens, many of patients are ultimately seen by physicians in primary care, surgery or pain management specialties. But these pain syndromes can be difficult to treat, and while doctors prescribe opioids to help, the drugs are often not effective and present significant side effects, including tolerance, dependence, misuse and opioid use disorder.
Extreme options like implanted devices tend to work extremely well, Emerick said, but even if they eliminate the pain, they’re problematic.
“If the pain gets better, now the device is stuck in the body. If it gets infected, it has to be removed,” he said. It’s a risky, not to mention expensive procedure. In some cases, implanted devices can even lead to more pain. “The overall complication rate with all of these risks combined is 30%-40%.”
But the nerve stimulator not only dissolves in the body as pain improves over a predetermined period of time, but if for any reason a person is unhappy with it, the battery can be adjusted to emit a specific waveform that will quickly break down the stimulator: “degradation on command,” according to Emerick.
Pitt is ranked No. 14 nationally for U.S. patents, with 114 in the past year alone. Over the past seven years, the University has spun out 109 companies from Pitt technologies.
Want to be one of them? If you are a Pitt faculty, staff or student with an interest in pursuing commercialization of a business idea or research innovation, contact the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at innovate [at] pitt.edu.
From researchers to entrepreneurs
To mitigate the risk while still providing the kind of pain relief that implants offer, Emerick reached out to the Swanson School’s Center for Medical Innovation. “I asked if they had anyone who could help me develop something that would dissolve. I didn't know if that was a fairy tale or something that could really happen.”
He heard from Xinyan (Tracy) Cui, William Kepler Whiteford Professor of Bioengineering, who has a background in chemical engineering, materials sciences and biophysics. “My research is in this interdisciplinary field where we are using engineering and materials science to help develop implantable devices,” she said. She’d done work with biodegradable metals and polymers in the past. “So I thought, OK, I can help.”
Her graduate student at the time, Kevin Woeppel, had been working on developing materials for drug delivery and preventing electrodes from triggering adverse immune reactions. Emerick had found the perfect research partners.
They also turned out to be great entrepreneurial partners. Cui has filed many invention disclosures and has had a patent licensed, though Vanish Therapeutics is her first startup.
Like Emerick, this was Woeppel’s first foray into the entrepreneurial space, though even as a student, he had expressed interest. “I really enjoy being on the research side of things,” he said. “I just wanted to see what taking it one step further would be like.”
Cui said she hears this from students often, “It's not uncommon for a student at that age or stage of their career to try to explore more things,” she said. “They want to know what is best for them.” It turned out, reaching out to the Office of innovation and Entrepreneurship (OIE) was the best move for them all.
Filing an invention disclosure with OIE in 2020 led to the team’s participation in the NSF I-Corps program, which paired them with a mentor who helped them develop a business plan. They also received funding through the Clinical and Translational Science Institute and, as a student, Woeppel, now a biosafety engineer at Philips Respironics, won the Michael G. Wells Student Healthcare Competition.
Startups beget startups, and Emerick is not only mentoring others but is also thinking about the next project.
“There were multiple times where I hit what seemed like a dead end,” he said. “But maybe part of the process is, if you have a decent idea, it will keep coming back if you keep working on it.”
Photography by Tom Altany