University of Arizona tech-advancement arm honors inventors, mentors

Tech Launch Arizona honored three people, a startup company and a key campus partner this week for helping further the agency’s mission of bringing University of Arizona inventions to market.

TLA’s fourth annual I-Squared Expo & Awards, held Tuesday at the Jim Click Hall of Champions at McKale Center, also featured a “pitch session,” allowing faculty startups to practice their business pitches in front of a TLA panel ahead of an upcoming event in Silicon Valley.

The expo featured exhibits of a number of UA technologies in development, including a living heart patch invented at the College of Medicine, a high-altitude inflatable antenna and a new tunable laser.

Honors awarded by TLA were:

• Inventor of the Year, Physical Sciences: Douglas Loy, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry in the College of Science and professor of materials science and engineering in the College of Engineering. A prolific inventor, Loy has 15 inventions to his name, ranging from fluorescent epoxies to sunscreens to antioxidants. He has participated in the TLA’s National Science Foundation I-Corps program, which aims to increase the impact of university research by helping to move promising inventions toward commercialization.
• Inventor of the Year, Life Sciences: Vijay Gokhale, director of computational chemistry at the UA Bio5 Institute’s drug discovery and development initiative. Gokhale has worked with TLA and a number of scientists as a co-inventor on multiple projects related to drug discovery.
• Startup of the Year: MetOxs Electrochemical (faculty members Jinhong Zhang, Dominic Gervasio, Moe Momayez; co-inventor and partner Abraham Jalbout). MetOxs has licensed several UA technologies to address environmental and energy issues in mining, including molten-salt metal extraction methods, heat recovery systems and corrosion sensors, as well as a spinoff developing a fly ash-based substitute for concrete.
• Campus Collaborator of the Year: McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship TLA said the top-rated McGuire Center has been “an indispensable partner” in the agency’s NSF I-Corps program.
• Ecosystem Impact of the Year: Katina Koller, CEO of Northwire Inc.
• As a volunteer TLA “commercialization partner,” Koller is an active participant in TLA’s weekly round-table discussions and has served as a mentor for NSF I-Corps teams, a proactive supporter of TLA projects and “an overall enthusiastic contributor to the TLA mission,” the agency said.

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BUSINESS PITCHES

Four of the startup companies on the expo were picked by TLA to deliver 10-minute business pitches to a panel and answer rapid-fire questions.

One representative from each of the companies will have expenses paid to travel with TLA to Silicon Valley in early May to make a pitch at TechCode, a global startup incubator TLA has partnered with to increase the reach and effectiveness of UA inventions and startups.

The pitching companies are: Avery Therapeutics, recently formed to commercialize a graft for a beating heart invented at the College of Medicine; Regulonix, which is developing biotech inhibitor drugs for chronic pain; BDIAB, advancing a platform for the analysis of big healthcare data; and Reglagene, which has developed technology to “turn off” cancer genes.