SYRACUSE, N.Y. — Six companies are participating in the Medical Device Innovation Challenge (MDIC), a program of Upstate Medical University’s CNY Biotech Accelerator (CNYBAC).

The initiative is supported through a grant from Empire State Development. 

The committee selected the teams from a pool of 33 applicants, the largest batch of applications for the competition to date. 

The participants selected for 2021 Medical Device Innovation Challenge include Oratel Diagnostics, Rubitection, Dancing Eyes, JelikaLite, DB Therapeutics, and MindTrace.

“We are very excited about the six selected teams, three of which are women-founded companies,” Kathi Durdon, executive director of the CNYBAC, said in a release. “Our graduate teams to date have generated significant achievements and we’re confident the latest cohort of innovative teams will achieve similar success.” 

Five of the participating teams are from New York state and the other is based in Pennsylvania. Teams taking part may participate from anywhere in the U.S., Upstate Medical said. 

Durdon also noted that the pool of applications also included the greatest number of Upstate Medical faculty-founded company applications at four. The committee selected one of those teams and the other three are receiving independent support through the SUNY Research Foundation and the Innovation Law Center at the Syracuse University College of Law. 

“We had a great response from mentors this year as well,” Durdon said. “We are able to team up four to five mentors per team. Mentors are aligned based on team needs — regulatory, manufacturing, product design, intellectual property protection, etc.” 

Medical Device Innovation Challenge participants receive six months of “intensive” mentorship, Innovation Law Center commercialization research, free workspace, and use of equipment in the CNYBAC Creation Garage, along with access to Upstate academic medical-center expertise and core facilities throughout the six-month program.

Upstate Medical University provided the following brief descriptions of each participating company.

Oratel Diagnostics

Oratel Diagnostics is designing a sensitive and specific, non-invasive test to detect endometriosis to decrease health-care costs and improve the health and wellbeing of girls and women with the disease. Endometriosis affects millions of girls and women of reproductive age globally, who are likely to experience severe pelvic pain and infertility. 

Protected by four issued patents, this company has formed a collaborative team with more than 30 years experience in bioengineering, computation biology, and reproductive epidemiology.

Rubitection

Rubitection’s chronic skin-health assessment and care-management system — the Rubitect Assessment System (RAS) — improves the early assessment and management of wounds, dermatological conditions, and vascular conditions with an initial application to bedsore prevention, an $11 billion health-care problem. 

The RAS provides a measurement device and care-management platform to monitor the signs of inflammation in the skin to support early detection, prevention, and personalized-care management.

Dancing Eyes

Dancing Eyes works to help health-care providers overcome the “complexity and entanglement” of eye-movement disorders and provide a “more reliable” diagnosis and treatment for common conditions such as vertigo or double vision. 

Dancing Eyes is an interactive, virtual-reality-based head-worn device that the company hopes can improve the care of patients with vertigo and other eye disorders, and expedite the treatment of their most serious causes, such as strokes.

JelikaLite

Autism rates are rising across the world. “There is no cure and parents are desperate.” Annual autism costs in the U.S. are expected to reach $450 billion by 2025. JelikaLite is developing Cognilum, an “innovative solution to permanently reduce” children’s autism symptoms, “enabling better integration” into society and reducing lifelong costs. 

Cognilum is a data-device integrated system, where a wearable therapeutic medical device is combined with an artificial-intelligence-based learning platform.

DB Therapeutics

DB Therapeutics is an early-stage medical device company poised to commercialize a convenient and cost-effective holmium radiotherapeutic bandage to treat skin-cancer lesions. The radiotherapeutic bandage offers accessibility and patient convenience “like no other skin-cancer therapy currently available on the market.”

MindTrace

MindTrace leverages machine learning to enable neurosurgical teams to simulate a resection plan and predict that patient’s cognitive outcome — all before the first incision, or in real-time during surgery. 

MindTrace helps neurosurgeons visualize and understand why some surgical routes are better for certain patients than others, and where you would have an accident “before the accident ever happens”… “all to ensure that patients do not take a ‘hit’ to an important cognitive domain after surgery.”