With a wealth of successful technology startups in fields ranging from health sciences to digital graphics to sustainable materials — not to mention strong support from public/private partnerships and initiatives like EngenuitySC, SCLaunch and Innovista (among many others) — Columbia continues to establish itself as the new capital of innovation in South Carolina and far beyond.
“Over 30 companies have been formed based on USC research in the past four years,” says Don Herriott, Director of Innovista Partnerships at the University of South Carolina. “The birth of high-impact South Carolina companies generates local wealth and can change the world with new innovations for business, societal and environmental needs.”
“While we still have a long way to go, Columbia has made tremendous progress in its ability to conceive, incubate and grow tech businesses,” says Neil McLean, Executive Director of EngenuitySC. “Our business, higher ed and political leaders understand that knowledge economy businesses are Columbia’s ticket to wealth creation in the future.”
The three products and companies featured here represent only a small number of the game-changing technologies and innovators leading the way to a brighter future for Columbia and all of South Carolina.
Learn more about these and other technology startups at
www.sclaunch.org.
MoleMapCD® Technology
Developed and distributed by DigitalDerm, Inc.
Saving people from melanoma, one patient at a time
www.digitalderm.com
In use for more than a decade at Duke and other medical facilities, MoleMapCD® technology is an imaging record system that employs total body photography to create a standardized, comprehensive map of a patient’s body. DigitalDerm hopes it will become the new standard of care for at-risk patients in identifying melanoma in early, more treatable stages.
Founded by leading melanoma expert James Grichnik, M.D., Ph.D., and Sam Chesnutt, who was involved with several Midlands-area photographic and computer companies, the company is a graduate of the USC-Columbia Technology Incubator program, established to “increase the vitality of the regional economy by recruiting and nurturing start-up companies that advance technological development, employ highly skilled workers and contribute to the economic development of the area.” Although Grichnik has since moved to establish a melanoma program at the University of Miami, he still serves as medical advisor, and Chesnutt is a member of the Board of Directors. Martin Lefkowitz currently serves as CEO.
“I joined DigitalDerm in 2003, and was asked to develop the company into a commercial entity for national distribution of the MoleMapCD®,” says Lefkowitz. “My background is in finance, raising capital and working with the development of small companies. I had been retired for 10 years when this opportunity was presented.
“My interest in coming out of retirement was piqued for two reasons: the excitement of working with a start-up company, and [the fact that] two people very close to me had developed melanoma. As I considered the offer, one question kept coming up — how could there not be a baseline series of images of a patient at risk, when one of the key indicators of a potential melanoma is change on the skin’s surface?
“No one can remember all of the moles, or determine new moles, on a patient’s body. A baseline set of skin surface images is critical to determine if any changes have occurred, and that’s what the MoleMapCD® provides. Specifically, it’s a collection of 36 standardized, high-resolution digital photos. The CD also includes our proprietary software that allows for rapid display and a palette of image manipulation and print tools, including magnification up to 400 times.”
Lefkowitz spent three years raising start-up capital, completing research and development and establishing sales and marketing plans. The MoleMapCD® was first offered commercially in 2007. The company is now close to being cash-positive on a monthly basis and expects to be profitable for 2011.
DigitalDerm currently employs eight business and sales professionals, as well as eight independent imaging specialists who are trained and certified by the company to ensure quality control. To date, the company has imaged more than 4,000 patients for institutions including Stanford University, Emory University, the University of Arizona, Eastern Virginia Medical System and others. The technology is available at several local hospitals and imaging sites throughout the Southeast.
“Initially, our marketing focus was on the benefit to physicians,” says Lefkowitz. “We were surprised to learn how important the CD was to patients themselves. A 2008 survey of 63 patients revealed that 91 percent performed skin self-examinations at home, and around 80 percent used the MoleMapCD® to do so. In the short time we had been imaging, one patient found a lesion of concern that turned out to be a melanoma.” Lefkowitz and his team are also working on additional applications, including formats that apply to other significant skin diseases.
“We received significant statewide capital investments from individual and corporate donors like Charleston Angel Partners and SC Launch, and are now seeking capital to help launch a national marketing program,” says Lefkowitz. “We hope to reach the top 50 markets by the end of 2013. While the state has shown a tremendous interest to fund entrepreneurial startups like ours, my concern is that very little follow-on capital has been made available to help these companies reach the next level of growth. I know dollars are scarce, but if our governor and state legislature make follow-on capital available, these companies will have the opportunity to expand, create a positive environment for entrepreneurship and, most importantly, stay in South Carolina. They have already taken the biggest risk — why not benefit from those efforts?”
tekktoc®
Created and developed by iTekka, Inc.
Intuitive. Quick. Precise.
www.itekka.com
No matter where you work or what you do for a living, the old adage is still true — time is money. For better or for worse, it’s also true that we have more distractions vying for our attention than ever before. Whether tracking billable time as an attorney, accountant, consultant or other professional, or just wondering how many truly productive hours you spend on a daily or weekly basis, tekktoc® software from iTekka, Inc., can help you make the most of every minute. This fully automated time capture application runs quietly in the background on computers, telephones and handheld devices and automatically records how you actually spend the time that otherwise might slip away.
“We all strive to be efficient in what we do, but with the ever-increasing rhythm of our everyday lives, it’s easy to get side-tracked and lose focus on our priorities,” says iTekka Founder and CEO Alexander Abrashkin. “Our proprietary software, tekktoc®, automatically records and visualizes the whole day for you. You can log billable hours more accurately and see just how much time you really spent skimming news or checking Facebook.” Abrashkin says the “entrepreneurship bug” bit him while a student at USC, working on his Master’s degree in computer science.
“The whole idea materialized out of thin air during a conversation with my good friend Jim Byrum, who is now my business partner. That conversation was held in a local bar — Goatfeathers — and for a long time the software was simply called ‘The Goat Project.’ Our initial idea slowly transformed into a full-fledged graduate research project. In 2008, two hours after defending my Master’s thesis on the same subject, I was in a downtown law office signing incorporation documents for iTekka, Inc. I didn’t even have to change a tie.”
iTekka is an SC Launch portfolio company, and its innovative software is licensed from USC. Working closely with these and other strategic partners, iTekka has created a valuable product for today’s technology-enhanced marketplace. For their efforts, the company has received two Palmetto Pillar Awards — Best Start-Up Venture and Best Licensed IT Product — from the Greater Columbia Chamber of Commerce’s Information Technology Council (ITC). Just three years after inception, iTekka has started introducing its tekktoc® software to the market and plans to create 20 knowledge-based jobs by 2014. For service-providing businesses especially, the long-term financial benefits of using a time-capturing system like theirs is clearly evident.
“If a professional like an attorney spends 20 minutes a day trying to re-create his or her time, that can easily add up to about 80 hours a year that they could be spending with clients instead,” says Abrashkin. “Our goal was to build a tool to recapture the time you lose with timesheets. After all, your time is your most valuable commodity. Analytical reports produced by tekktoc® are also invaluable in personnel productivity assessments, identifying and replicating best business practices and assessing a firm’s real cost of doing business.”
Fulfilling its tagline, tekktoc® software is intuitive, quick and precise. Activities captured from your desktop, calendar and telephone appear on different timelines, enabling you to visually categorize tasks. Easy color-coding makes reviewing captured data simple. Recorded in real-time, professional activities are effortlessly tracked to the second and automatically pre-sorted for quick and easy review. Today tekktoc® (beta) is being used by a focus group of attorneys at McNair Law Firm in Columbia. On average, it saves 20-30 minutes per day for active users by capturing their billable activities automatically.
“Our beta users have found tekktoc® so convenient, they keep reminding us that they really don’t want to go back to their manual time-tracking days,” says Abrashkin. “While beta testing continues, we have started offering tekktoc® in the marketplace on a pre-order basis. This is a big step for our young operation, and we look forward to working with more early-adopting customers like McNair.
“Accurate billing is not only about good business practices, it’s an ethical code. Pen and paper timekeeping requires constant attention and takes valuable minutes away from your clients. You already trust software to land airplanes — why not let it take care of your timesheets?”
Resuscinex®
Invented and developed by Vitasol, Inc.
Engineering Biomedical Solutions for Life
www.resuscinex.com
Traumatic injury — including hypovolemic shock, an emergency condition in which severe blood and fluid loss makes the heart unable to pump enough blood to the body — is one of the leading causes of death and disability in both industrialized and developing countries. Globally, injury is the seventh leading cause of death, with 5.8 million deaths attributable to trauma in 2006. In the U.S., trauma is the leading cause of death in children and adults up to 44 years of age. It is also the most frequent cause of death in both civilian and military trauma. For these patients and the medical professionals who treat them, obtaining hemostasis and providing adequate resuscitation are the top priorities. Within the first 24 hours of injury, 35 to 40 percent of civilian deaths are due to hemorrhage and are potentially survivable (
National Health Statistics Reports, Number 7, August 6, 2008. Center for Disease Control and Prevention).
Vitasol, Inc., was founded in December 2007 around the patented invention and development of an innovative cellular resuscitative fluid aptly named Resuscinex®, intended to treat victims of trauma and other causes of severe blood or fluid loss. CEO John Propst, Ph.D., MBA, explains how the company and its initial product came about.
“In 2005, I arrived at the USC School of Medicine to earn a doctorate in biomedical sciences. The Department of Surgery and Department of Cell, Biology and Anatomy allowed me to study applied biomedical science, which meant exposure to real-world clinical situations, as well as the bench science behind new technologies. I studied under the advisement of Associate Professors Michael Yost, Ph.D., a chemical engineer and the Director of Research for the Department of Surgery, and Stephen Fann, M.D., FACS, a Board-Certified General Surgeon with additional certifications in Surgical Critical Care. Two years into those studies I began work on an MBA at the Moore School of Business,” says Propst.
“During my Ph.D. candidacy, Drs. Fann and Yost invented Resuscinex®. Subsequently, many conversations surrounded the impact this revolutionary product would have on millions of critical care patients and military personnel. Taking into account the void in the current resuscitative fluid market, Vitasol was founded to bring ‘biomedical solutions for life’ through a developmental phase into the marketplace to ultimately improve patient therapy and care.”
The company currently employs a team of six — including business development directors, advisors, inventors and researchers — and is currently in the process of manufacturing Resuscinex® for FDA clinical trials in the state of South Carolina. Dr. Fann serves as Vitasol’s CMO.
“The concept of Resuscinex® evolved out of [my own] clinical experiences,” says Fann. “Time and time again, I have witnessed patients present with severe hemorrhagic injuries, shock, hypotension (low blood pressure), and acidosis (low blood pH). Even with control of hemorrhage and injury, many patients continue a downward spiral of hypotension, ongoing volume requirement and multi-organ failure leading to death.
“I asked myself: ‘Why do we lose the war after winning the battle?’ In other words, why does a patient successfully treated with operative correction of bleeding go on to die? What produces this ‘point of no return’ with shock? There are two current therapeutic applications to this problem: aggressive control of hemorrhage — stop the bleeding — and crystalloid resuscitation. Our concept was to develop a multicomponent fluid to resuscitate victims of shock, maximizing cellular resuscitation and minimizing nonspecific systemic inflammation.”
“Resuscinex® effectively restores and sustains hemodynamic parameters (vital signs) at very low volumes and is the only product that also takes into account cellular metabolism and cellular resuscitation after an insult to the patient’s system,” says Propst.
Vitasol hopes to begin manufacturing the fluid in South Carolina soon and also has a few complementary products in the conceptual phase of development. In August 2010, the company received continued support from the South Carolina Research Authority’s SC Launch program by advancing from a client company to a full portfolio with the maximum investment made by the organization.
“We are proud to be a part of Columbia’s knowledge-based economy engine,” says Propst. “Our research and development has been well received by others, and we are in the process of making those reviews public. We plan to remain in SC as long as feasible, including clinical trial sites and manufacturing. Ongoing research for product development and safety will continue to be contracted back through USC for as long as possible. The Resuscinex® patent has been assigned to the USC Research Foundation, and Vitasol Inc. has licensed exclusive worldwide rights. Both entities stand to benefit from the successful development and launch of a successful product. As is the case with most biotechnology companies, we are always in the process of fundraising.”