Naimat Bari
Track
Innovation
Faculty Mentor
Bahareh Behkam
Associate Professor
How will the Innovation Fellowship help you advance and grow as a professional?
The Innovation Postdoctoral Fellowship offers an opportunity to learn product-oriented academic research and entrepreneurial skills. It prepares an individual for spinning out a startup company through innovation and entrepreneurship in an academic setup. Professionally, I aim to lead therapeutic and diagnostic product development in healthcare. With that goal in mind, I am excited to be supported by the Virginia Tech Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship Innovation track. It will help me get trained with new skill sets and open new opportunities and challenges.
Briefly describe the technology you are working to commercialize. What problems does your technology solve? What impact do you expect it to have on the marketplace?
In the MicronBASE Lab at Virginia Tech, I am working with Prof. Bahareh Behkam to develop Fibrous-Engineered Living Material (F-ELM) bandages. Our bacteria-based F-ELM bandage promotes wound healing while monitoring for infection. Wound infection disrupts the wound-healing process, resulting in significant morbidity and mortality. It is also the leading cause of nontraumatic limb amputations worldwide. Smart bandages that monitor the wound are expected to enhance patient outcomes, but the current technologies are complex and costly, with limited specificity and lifetime. Bioactive wound dressings are developed to promote healing, but the encapsulated therapeutics' finite loading and short half-life limit long-term efficacy. Thus, there is a significant unmet need for simple, cost-effective, and smart multi-functional bandages that continuously monitor wounds to detect infection with high sensitivity and self-trigger to promote healing by on-demand in situ synthesis of biomolecules. Successful completion will spark a paradigm shift in chronic and massive wound care. The proposed system will be cost-effective and accessible to underserved communities and empower all Americans' multifaceted well-being. Its commercialization will offer an excellent opportunity to be a part of the growing advanced wound care market, valued at $6.7 bn in 2021 and growing at an annual compound growth rate of between 6 and 10 percent.
What got you interested in pursuing technology commercialization efforts?
With my training in pharmaceutical science and bio-nanotechnology, I realized that many exciting things are being done on lab benches. Unfortunately, in rare cases, they get transferred to the market. Attending a few sessions on the technology commercialization path at Virginia Tech, I realized that it's imperative for someone in academic research to learn the skill sets of innovation and entrepreneurship to commercialize an idea. These skill sets will help me grow professionally and help my fellow researchers look for commercial opportunities in their research work.
What commercialization activities and training opportunities have you already engaged in through Virginia Tech and other relevant organizations? How have these resources assisted you in advancing your commercializtion efforts?
Our team participated in the NSF Regional I-Corps Short Course offered by VT LAUNCH to validate a startup opportunity in June 2023. I was also part of the Fralin Commercialization Fellow Program (March-October, 2023), where I was mentored in developing a business model for laboratory innovations. Our team participated as a cohort in the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI)-Nanotechnology Entrepreneurship Challenge (NTEC) in May 2023 and won 3rd place. I also took a course on Startup Lab: Foundations of Academic Spinouts, offered by VT LAUNCH, September-October 2023. All these activities have helped me understand the commercialization landscape from an academic perspective and the various funding opportunities and resources available to support these efforts.
Who will you be working with during this fellowship at Virginia Tech? What expertise and skills do your collaborators and mentors bring to help you advance your training and professional development?
I have been working in MicronBASE Lab since June 2021 under the mentorship of Prof. Bahareh Behkam. It has been a great learning experience. I enjoy my research work and am immensely motivated by the translational potential of various projects carried out in the lab. Behkam lab specializes in bio-hybrid systems engineering with an emphasis on human health. They are a global leader in engineered living systems and have pioneered programmable bacterial biohybrid swarms for biosensing and therapy. Behkam Lab, in collaboration with STEP Lab at VT, has also shown that aligned nanofibers help close wounds and thus help them heal faster. Integrating these insights from the two labs helped us develop F-ELM bandages to facilitate efficacious wound management, eventually reducing associated morbidity. These smart bandages will employ living sensors to detect pathogens while uniformly aligning fiber material, which will help in quicker wound healing.