The team has accumulated more than $27 million in sponsored research agreements spanning across many departments at UCI, with the School of Medicine and UCI’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering seeing the largest contributions. This new achievement for the team has more than doubled the total amount brought in by sponsored research agreements over the last five years, starting with approximately $12.3 million in 2016.

“Beall Applied Innovation established a really exceptional team of contracting officers,” said Dave Gibbons, MBA, director of Industry Sponsored Research and interim executive director at UCI Beall Applied Innovation. “When Kevin [Kennan] first took over, Richard asked him to build a ‘speed-of-business’ team, he found some really experienced and level headed people that can deal well with industry.”

ISR manages and supports agreements involving research funded by or through for-profit industry sponsors (excluding clinical trials). Some staple partnerships that helped achieve their recording-breaking numbers includes a two-year study between UCI, Anthem and Apple, in addition to agreements with TAE Technologies as well as UCI faculty, namely Diran Apelian, distinguished professor of Materials Science and Engineering, chief strategy officer at the School of Engineering and director of UCI’s Advanced Casting Research Center.

“We are starting to see some of the payoff from the campus’ strategic investment in key faculty hires,” said Gibbons. “Bringing in new hires and with them, their companies, creates a great opportunity for existing faculty to engage and develop interesting and new projects that might have been impossible before. It’s a real affirmation of the campus’ strategic goals and really lays the foundation for our team to stay pretty busy over the next couple of years.”

Last year was also record breaking with ISR clocking in at $21.8 million in sponsored research agreements. This year, the School of Medicine saw the biggest growth, 86% increase since last year. They school experienced a $5.2 million increase, according to Gibbons.

The School of Engineering accounts for one-third of the $27M total — up from $6.4 million to $8 million, a 25% increase. ISR aims to achieve $30 million in sponsored research agreements by 2022.

Learn more about ISR.

Main Graphic: Kate Wokowsky, UCI Beall Applied Innovation
Photo: Ryan Mahar, UCI Beall Applied Innovation

The Beall Student Design Competition at the Henry Samueli School of Engineering welcomes projects that involve the development of hardware and devices, while the Butterworth Product Development Competition at the Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences is geared toward the development of software. Open to all UCI students, the competitions promote the creation of new technologies with the potential for commercialization and offer prizes of $10,000, $6,500 and $3,500 for teams that place first, second and third, respectively.

Startup team forMED Technologies won first place in the seventh annual Beall Student Design Competition. The startup seeks to improve glaucoma treatment with an at-home eye pressure monitoring system. Co-founder Raphael “Francis” Aguas — an undergraduate research assistant at the Khine Lab — credits the ANTrepreneur Center and its manager, Jaune Odombrown, for preparing his team for successes such as this one.

“The ANTrepreneur Center programs have been an invaluable part of our success in this competition,” said Aguas. “Jaune’s feedback on our pitch deck and overall guidance in developing and validating our business plan have been critical to our company’s growth. Additionally, through the ANTrepreneur Center, we have been able to expand our network of experienced entrepreneurs, medical device experts, and like-minded student entrepreneurs — all of whom have helped us advance forMED to where it is today.”

The forMED Technologies team plans to use the prize money to fund prototype development and secure their intellectual property.

Startup team Grasshopperfund won first place in 11th annual Butterworth Product Development Competition. The team was also recently selected as a semifinalist in the Blackstone Launchpad and Techstars Network startup pitch competition. Grasshopperfund is the first rewards-based crowdfunding platform for youth-led startups that also provides coaching and mentorship opportunities for young entrepreneurs. Founder and CEO Caitlyn Yang plans to use the team’s $10,000 prize for key marketing, legal and education resources as they prepare for the next stages of growth.

“After seeing the positive impact we could make first-hand through workshops and events we’ve held and the community we’ve built, we decided to enter the competition and are grateful that the judges resonated with our mission to bring ideas to life, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic standing,” said Yang, who also serves as the ANTrepreneur Center’s Student Associate Manager.

Startup Nutripair, co-founded by Catlin Tran and Bing Mo, took home the second-place prize in the Butterworth Product Development Competition. Nutripair is a health and wellness startup designed to pair individuals with personalized nutrition solutions to help them make informed decisions for tackling chronic illnesses through dietary means. Members of the Nutripair team have taken part in the ANTrepreneur Center’s Innovation & Entrepreneurship Internship.

“The Innovation and Entrepreneurship Internship and one-on-one consulting greatly impacted Nutripair’s progress,” said Tran. “The cohort fostered a collaborative environment of startup founders who were all willing to help and provide wonderful insights from ideation, business development, to pitch deck.”

Nutripair’s prize winnings will go toward the technical development of their minimum viable product and incorporation fees.

Coincidentally, all three winning teams are recipients of the UCI Beall Applied Innovation Creativity & Entrepreneurship Scholarship — a collaboration between Applied Innovation and the Office of Financial Aid and Scholarships which awards up to $3,000 to any UCI student with an inventive solution to a community need or problem.

Learn more about the ANTrepreneur Center.

Main Graphic: Kate Wokowsky

What started out as a simple phrase to describe bringing intelligence to inanimate objects in 1956, artificial intelligence (AI) would later be responsible, in the form of IBM’s Deep Blue computer, for defeating Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997, according to Live Science. In fact, AI can now be found in every field of science and can claim more than just chess wins.

Thanks in part to their own AI, UC Irvine (UCI) startup Docbot has also been winning and they’re not playing around.

As one of UCI Beall Applied Innovation’s first startups to come out of the Wayfinder incubator, Docbot uses AI predictive technology to detect polyps in real time to help guide disease diagnosis, prevention and healthcare decision-making. The company has experienced the quintessential peaks and valleys of the startup journey and has catapulted into a new stage of growth.

THE FIRST VALLEY
Shortly before his 18th birthday, Andrew Ninh, Docbot co-founder and chief strategy officer, was hospitalized for a spontaneous pneumothorax. While in the hospital, the nurses had learned to ignore the hospital system’s constant alerts since they were so common. It was in this inefficiency that Ninh saw an opportunity in improving healthcare’s interfaces between patients and clinicians. After meeting Dr. Bill Karnes, clinical professor of medicine at UCI’s School of Medicine and Docbot co-founder and chief scientific officer, who created an extensive database that collects high-quality data from colonoscopies, the two combined their skills and datasets to develop the foundation for Docbot’s deep learning system.

“Andrew [Ninh] is all about solving a problem with the interface between a physician and a patient, and collecting the data and creating beautiful pieces of software that could make it so easy,” said Karnes. “This was a marriage made in heaven.”

In 2018, they set up shop at UCI Health and joined the Wayfinder incubator at UCI Beall Applied Innovation. Additionally, they took advantage of the program by utilizing Applied Innovation’s office space to conduct business and gain access to the Innovation Advisor network.

“I think the most valuable part [about Applied Innovation] is plugging the companies into the Innovation Advisors,” said Ninh. “It’s finding the people who want to help and nurture young companies and getting connected to those companies. How else would you do it in Orange County? You’d have to go to these events and it’s kind of like empty networking, but when you have a trusted source like UCI bridging that gap, I think that’s the biggest value UCI brings.”

CLIMBING THE PEAKS
Since launching their startup, Docbot has experienced much success, climbing each peak with calculated ease.
Not shortly after their days in Wayfinder, Docbot was accepted into Y Combinator, a seed money startup accelerator located in the Bay Area, and after the three-month program, exited in 2019 with multiple interested investors at their side and $2.045 million in funding in their pockets. During the 2019 Orange County Business Journal Innovator of the Year Awards ceremony, the team was recognized as one of three innovators of the year.

A few weeks prior to California officially shutting its doors, Ninh spoke about his experiences pitching to investors at the inaugural Orange County Celebrates Entrepreneurs event held at California State University-Fullerton. Ninh emphasized that entrepreneurs need to treat every pitch like it’s the first pitch, though he says these days, he is more intimidated when he pitches to customers.

“Ultimately, that’s the money that makes the company long-lasting,” said Ninh. “Anyone who gives you money, you have to have your best foot forward all the time.”

Toward the end of 2020, the Docbot team published a collaborative study with Eli Lilly and Company, a pharmaceutical company based in the U.S., in the leading journal “Gastroenterology” that was the first to show deep learning AI can be trained to automatically predict levels of ulcerative colitis severity using endoscopic videos.

NEW KID ON THE BLOCK
With continued success comes growth and in January, Docbot brought on Andrew Ritter, MBA, as CEO to lead the company. Ritter aims to commercialize the company as well as raise Docbot’s Series A funding round by the end of 2021.

“Andrew [Ninh] has done a really great job of creating a foundation for the business and building it from the ground up with his passion and determination – that’s what launches companies,” said Ritter. “In addition, UCI Beall Applied Innovation was a key component of our company’s foundational launch and success. We wouldn’t be where we are today without their continued support and relationship.”

Not new to the startup world, in 2007, Ritter established and grew Ritter Pharmaceuticals, a leading biotech company that focuses on the microbiome of the gut and gastrointestinal diseases. He took the company public in 2015 and in May 2020, the company was acquired by Qualigen Therapeutics, Inc., a biotech company that develops therapeutic products for cancer and infectious disease treatments.

“I’ve always been interested in the cross-section between healthcare and innovation. When the company was acquired and I exited, I really wanted to look for an innovative healthcare company that I could help operate and grow,” said Ritter. “Docbot hit a lot of boxes – it’s GI, innovative and I thought the team was great.”

JETSETTING THE INNOVATION SKYWAYS
The pandemic may have temporarily paused travel, but not for Docbot. With Ninh splitting his time between Orange County and the Bay Area, private planes have literally brought the team together.

“Our COO has a small plane that he flies Andrew [Ninh] down to Southern California and we meet in my backyard,” said Ritter.

The Docbot team now has a national, multicenter study that aims to prove their AI actually assists physicians in finding more polyps. The team hopes to realize the dream, as Karnes references, of their technology providing a perspective equivalent to sitting on the doctor’s shoulder and collecting high-quality data in the process.

“By having the data, then we can do what’s truly valuable and that’s predictive modeling,” said Karnes. “Applying machine learning and having all of those factors we may not even have a clue play a role in your risk, like genetics and lifestyle. It’s not evidence-based medicine, it’s intelligence based medicine.”

Learn more about Docbot.

All Photos and Graphics: Julie Kennedy, UCI Beall Applied Innovation

Produced by UCI Beall Applied Innovation
Directed, filmed & edited by Julie Kennedy

A swish of a magic wand to make dreams come true is the stuff of fairy tales. But, Wayfinder startup Current Surgical believes they can create a hopeful dose of reality with their own version of a magic wand in the form of a tiny needle.
A microneedle to be exact.

The startup aims to bring to market a smart surgical needle to enable the next generation of micro-invasive therapies. Their first focus will be on oncology and, more specifically, liver cancer, which will claim more than 30,000 lives in the U.S. this year and generally, has a five-year survival rate of 20%, according to the American Cancer Society.

“People often can’t receive curative treatment because the tumors are near critical anatomy,” said Al Mashal, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of Current Surgical. “So, they have to either rely on chemotherapy or radiation, which just slows the disease. With Current Surgical’s technology, we are giving the tools doctors don’t have right now to treat a tumor that’s near critical anatomy, like arteries or bile ducts.”

Using real-time X-ray guidance, a microneedle is inserted into a tumor and, once inside the tumor, the needle uses ultrasound energy, which heats and more precisely kills the tumor without affecting nearby vital organs and tissue.

“Surgeons decide to operate when they know they can deliver good outcomes with the tools that are available. Which means, outcomes are limited by the quality of the tools,” said Chris Wagner, Ph.D., co-founder and chief technology officer of Current Surgical. “Here we have the opportunity to deliver something that’s straightforward to use and allows surgeons to address previously un-addressable tumors. So, (we are) giving these surgeons superpowers so everybody benefits.”

The dynamic duo recently received a $256,000 National Science Foundation Phase 1 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant and plans to use the funds to gather pre-clinical data by showing the technology working on animal tissue. Additionally, they have received critical guidance on their startup through Applied Innovation’s Wayfinder program, which they joined in July 2020. Current Surgical has found the program especially helpful, even during stay-at-home orders.

“The Wayfinder program has been hugely helpful. We have a dedicated mentor we talk with every other week, and there is a larger mentoring and support network,” said Wagner. “These highly accomplished members of the community are willing to spend their time, to help us be successful on all aspects of a new venture.”

Current Surgical has also been accepted into the first cohort of the SciFounders Fellowship, a new program that encourages people with more academic and scientific backgrounds to pursue entrepreneurship as a possible career path. The team was one of five chosen out of nearly 400 applicants.

“We are motivated to give patients a new hope for a lot of these cancers. Every time we hear about a friend or family member who died from cancer, that gives us extra urgency to try to create a better tool,” said Mashal. “Beyond oncology, we have a lot of opportunities to improve surgery as a whole. Cancer is just the first step.”

Learn more about Current Surgical.

Main Graphic: Kate Wokowsky, UCI Beall Applied Innovation
Photos courtesy of Current Surgical

The bacterium responsible for Botox, Clostridium botulinum (C. botulinum), and another deadly bacterium, Clostridioides difficile (C. diff), are the two main research areas of focus for Jin. In his lab, Jin and team uncover the blueprints behind these bacteria and the toxins they produce to better understand them and find ways to use their own mechanisms for good — such as improved cosmetics or potential cancer therapeutics — and to combat their deadly effects.

“We focus on the mechanism,” said Jin. “Knowing and understanding the mechanism at the molecular level is the universal approach. Once you know the blueprints of how it works, you can do so many things — you can make it better or worse.”

Jin’s lab has made significant strides in finding ways to combat C. diff infections — a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urgent threat — which are typically contracted in hospitals and healthcare settings and has symptoms ranging from diarrhea to life-threatening colitis. One approach pursued in the Jin lab is a novel vaccine that can prevent infections and the other is a protein therapeutic that essentially tricks the toxin into binding to the drug rather than the human receptors. The latter of the two is available for licensing through UCI Beall Applied Innovation’s Research Translation Group.

On the C. botulinum front however, a vaccine will likely never happen.

“There will be no chance to develop a vaccine for this toxin because nobody is going to take it,” said Jin. “If you take the vaccine, Botox doesn’t work!”

In light of this, Jin and team have shifted their focus from a C. botulinum vaccine to exploring the use of novel antitoxins to treat infections rather than prevent them or to develop new products with improved clinical and cosmetic features.

Jin makes clear that fully understanding how a bacterial toxin looks and operates within the human body is critically important. To illustrate that point, Jin and team are currently in the early stages of exploring the use of a fragment of the deadly C. diff toxin as a cancer treatment or using C. botulinum toxin’s own tactics to develop better and safer cosmetics.

“We focus on the mechanism and then we ask two questions,” said Jin. “‘Is there anything good about this toxin that we can learn from?’ and ‘How to play on a pathogen’s weakness to defeat it?’”

Learn more about Jin and his research.

Main photo and image courtesy of Rongsheng Jin, Ph.D.

Although there is no formula that guarantees companies a strong social media presence, there are some platform-specific tips that can be helpful. Here, co-founders from four Wayfinder startups share their experiences building and maintaining their companies’ presence on the internet.

1. Instagram: Constant content with a mission
Companies and users on Instagram are constantly competing for attention. One way to stand out, according to Kristine Smith, co-founder of Brevvie, a rental services company, is to educate users about a startup’s greater mission with a constant stream of content.

“Producing valuable ongoing content is a tedious task but a necessary one,” said Smith. Rather than only posting information about the company, Smith said that Brevvie uses its Instagram to promote sustainability and the benefits of renting and returning products versus owning them.

2. Facebook: Engaging specific audiences
Unlike other social media platforms, Facebook allows users to create and join online communities based on their interests. This, according to Roland Polzin, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Wing — an artificial intelligence-powered digital assistant for small businesses — can be advantageous for startups looking to build their social media presence.

“Facebook groups are a great way to engage with very specific audiences,” said Polzin, as such a feature can help companies more directly communicate with their target audience.

3. LinkedIn: Online networking
A feature unique to LinkedIn is the ability to see other users’ activity on a general news feed. If a company tags a person or organization in a post, users who follow those people or organizations will get notified, putting the company’s post in the news feed of potential customers. Liliana Montes, co-founder and CEO of Coast, an app designed to help users organize and find ideas for day trips, expands her company’s reach by using this particular LinkedIn feature to Coast’s advantage.

“We reach new audiences by tagging organizations, locations and people to tap into their LinkedIn networks,” said Montes. Collaborations between other companies and LinkedIn users can help drive traffic to an account, she added.

4. Twitter: Finding balance
Twitter’s immediacy lends itself to occasional informality, even from accounts that belong to companies and professionals. Esteban Alvarado, co-founder of Project Unicorn, an app for startup networking, said that his company reflects this culture in its Twitter account.

“By creating organic content that shares the mission of what our company believes through fun casual tweets as well as informational and professional tweets, we are growing our following by giving our followers something they can truly get behind,” said Alvarado.

Learn more about UCI Beall Applied Innovation’s startup resources.

Main graphic: Kate Wokowsky

Engaging historically underrepresented communities in entrepreneurship is easier said than done. But the Opportunity, Wayfinding and Networking (OWN) Initiative at UC Irvine (UCI) Beall Applied Innovation has been tackling this challenge head-on since 2018.

According to Applied Innovation Special Projects Lead Tim Shaw, the OWN Initiative is a set of measurable goals and objectives focused on increasing outreach, engagement and the success of underrepresented groups on campus and within Applied Innovation’s programming.

“The ultimate goal is [to include] more people from underrepresented groups and build the belief that entrepreneurship can be a pathway for them, all the way through access to capital and scaling of their enterprises,” said Shaw.

Last year, the Kauffman Fellows Research Institute found that only 2.6 % of startup executives in the U.S. are Latinx and 2.1% of startup executives are black. In January, the Intellectual Property & Industry Research Alliances at UC Berkeley found that although women own 17 % of startups, they receive less than three percent of venture capital funding.

To increase these numbers and diversify the beneficiaries of Applied Innovation’s resources, the OWN Initiative operates not as a singular entrepreneurial program, such as the Wayfinder Incubator or the Student Startup Fund, but as a lens under which the entirety of Applied Innovation filters all of its existing programs through. This way, said Shaw, from the ANTrepreneur Center to the I-Corps program, all of Applied Innovation can strive to incorporate diversity, equity and inclusion into all its resources.

Goals as great as fostering inclusion and diversity can’t be achieved overnight, but the OWN Initiative is making headway. It recently received a $50,000 grant to conduct entrepreneurial outreach to women who face significant underrepresentation in the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs.

ANTrepreneur Center Manager Jaune Odombrown also created the Next Generation of Ingenuity (NGI) student entrepreneur organization to ensure his program at Applied Innovation embodies the OWN Initiative’s inclusive spirit. NGI’s goal is to engage UCI’s underrepresented, undergraduate population with the ANTrepreneur Center by facilitating student-run outreach, events, programs and services. The new student organization enlists student representatives from all UCI Academic Departments to communicate with other students and put the resources of the ANTrepreneur Center on their radar.

“With NGI, we want students to get other students to come and work together so that they can be key representatives of the larger Student Entrepreneur Ecosystem,” said Odombrown. “It’s like a trickle-down effect, but it’s all student driven.”

Learn more about Applied Innovation’s resources.

All Photos: Julie Kennedy, UCI Beall Applied Innovation

Throughout the UC Irvine (UCI) campus community, innovative ideas and talented students help make the community thrive and reach new heights. The ANTrepreneur Center hosts a plethora of these forward-thinking Anteaters and now many students are continuing their journeys through the Innovation & Entrepreneurship internship program.

The Center’s newest internship caters to young minds by providing a 10-week guide through the psychology of an entrepreneur. This includes providing guidance on the research and structure needed to build a startup, how to deliver clear and concise pitches, and understanding other tools necessary for any person interested in the world of entrepreneurship.

“Our purpose is to deliver as much knowledge as we can, while students are building their business model at the same time,” said Jaune Odombrown, ANTrepreneur Center manager and creator of the internship program. “Once they’re done with that, we go straight into business model development, which is where we take their ideas that they were able to come up with and see the feasibility of it.”

Students have access to innovation advisors from UCI Beall Applied Innovation and the ANTrepreneur Center to help offer advice and guidance in each student’s respective fields of interest. Additionally, students receive course credit for completing the program, as it is an approved course under University Studies 193, a class offered by UCI that provides students with the ability to gain credit from on- or off-campus internships.

“When you’re in the program with your cohort, it’s a really tight bond,” said Odombrown. “Each and every single one of us are helping each other at the same time and those who are a little further along can share their experiences, as well. It’s a very different type of program since it’s not very academic at all. It is entrepreneurial within its core.”

Bryce Lindsey and Connie Wu are two students who were part of the internship’s first cohort and are continuing with their startups. Lindsey, now a UCI alumni, is the founder and CEO of Spraywell, a Wayfinder startup that created a hand sanitizer dispenser that attaches to the back of most smartphones. Wu is the founder and CEO of Flourish, which consists of programs offering better resources to help eighth through twelfth graders construct a pathway through their education and better prepare for their future. Wu plans to pilot the programs this summer.

Odombrown says he’s confident more students will be able to find success through the internship as long as they have the desire to thrive and move forward with their ideas.

“It’s a program that is going to help you develop in every aspect of your life,” said Odombrown. “At the end of the day, you’ll have lifelong skills that you can activate in any environment that you’re in. Whether it’s working for a company, mentoring your younger sibling, or owning your own company.”

To apply for the Innovation and Entrepreneurship internship program, email antrepreneur@uci.edu.

Photos & Graphics: Julie Kennedy, UCI Beall Applied Innovation

Produced by UCI Beall Applied Innovation
Directed & edited by Julie Kennedy
Filmed by Julie Kennedy & Ryan Mahar

It’s no secret the online learning community has exploded to accommodate the pandemic’s massive shift to digital platforms. But SimRated has been ahead of the curve since 2018.

SimRated is a UC Irvine (UCI) startup that provides online simulation training programs for medical procedures with a mission to improve patient safety by effectively training healthcare workers and students to perform these procedures through simulation-based training. Co-founder and CEO Dr. Cameron Ricks, clinical professor of Anesthesiology and director of the Medical Education Simulation Center at UCI’s School of Medicine, and his team have honed the program’s development and are now in revenue, reaching hundreds of students in their path to startup success.

FROM CLASSROOM TO COMPUTER
For over a decade, Ricks has taught anesthesiology and, during his time as the director of the Medical Education Simulation Center, began to realize a potential venture in online simulation training.

“I saw there was an opportunity to increase the number of students that we could influence and were able to train medical procedures by standardizing and putting the training online,” said Ricks. “SimRated allows you to remotely evaluate participants and students in medical procedures on simulators.”

About five years ago, Ricks and his partners, Michael Ma, co-founder and chief technology officer, and Keith Beaulieu, co-founder and chief operations officer, started a conversation about the concept for SimRated. Although the team agreed that it had great potential, they decided to wait to see if someone else in the market would think of the same idea.

“We thought ‘well, we’re not business people, we’re medical people, someone else is going to do this. It’s a great idea, this is clearly the next step,’” said Ricks. “We waited and started looking around and no one was doing it and we decided to take a stab at it.”
After Ricks provided the initial funding to get the software into development and other expenses, SimRated launched in October 2018 and less than a year later, his team began marketing SimRated’s programs to high schools and technical schools.

“Cameron and I work toward standardizing medical education, particularly in medical simulation for increased competence and patient safety down the line,” said Beaulieu. “We have customers in high school career and technical education programs using our products to learn how to do vital signs and suturing, all the way to the other side of the continuum with advanced airway techniques for medical students.”

SimRated’s program features over 30 online courses that teach students, from high school to medical school, different healthcare procedures, ranging from proper handwashing to intubation. Lately, their focus has turned into a business-to-business approach with high school teachers being their main demographic.

“There’s a lot of interest, especially recently,” said Ricks. “Because the kids aren’t in class, a lot of teachers were really looking for online opportunities, so we do fit that bill.”

This is how it works: A student logs into SimRated and studies the reading materials, and then takes an online exam. After passing the online exam, the student watches a video of the procedure while marking a checklist provided on the screen, which is based on the information from the assigned reading and the video components. The students will then upload a video of themselves completing the procedure where Ricks and a team of clinicians review and use the checklist to calculate the student’s score. A student with a score greater than 90 percent passes the course.

“We’re having fun with it; it’s an entrepreneurial adventure. It’s education for us; we’re learning, we get to interact with high school students and teachers,” said Ricks. “We also get to interact with the clinical experts who help develop the videos.”

THE ONLINE BUBBLE
Though SimRated’s original intent was to provide an online learning tool for students interested in the medical field, the abrupt shift to online learning during the pandemic helped the team gain momentum in high school classrooms across California, as teachers sought out new programs.

“Education is changing and people are looking to see what’s out there and are interested in online options, especially in spaces where they may not have that primary education because having a physician or nurse come into the classroom is not always possible because these clinicians are busy,” said Ricks. “We solve that problem by coming into the classroom remotely and I think that’s part of what attracts the teachers, as well.”

Though the world’s switch to online learning has been beneficial for the startup’s impact on high school educational reach, SimRated experienced their first sale about a year and half ago. Currently, their primary clientele, high school teachers, range in location from the Bay Area to Los Angeles Unified School District and local school districts in Orange County.

“SimRated allows me to scale my impact,” said Ricks. “It’s one thing to teach a group of six people every day, it’s another thing to be able to impact hundreds or [even] thousands of people.”

LOOKING AHEAD
Since its launch, the SimRated team has utilized UCI Beall Applied Innovation’s resources and programs to help the startup progress. Because Ricks was using his own capital to initially fund the company, Ricks consulted with licensing officers to ensure he was launching the startup through the appropriate UCI avenues. The team also took part in the I-Corps program, Applied Innovation’s market discovery program funded by the National Science Foundation, and have since joined the Wayfinder incubator, where the team remains as they move their startup forward.

“Our first customer came to because Juan Felipe [Vallejo] introduced me to an Innovation Advisor who said I should call this high school,” said Ricks. “So, I called and that was our first customer.”

Looking ahead, the team plans to study the growth of their startup, during and post-pandemic as well as expand into more high schools. SimRated also wants to move into higher education, like junior colleges and medical schools, Ricks says, each one with their own separate market and learning curves.

“My hope is one day this grows big enough that I can work for fun and stay at UCI because I enjoy it,” said Ricks. “I think I have many years until that happens, so I’m not quitting my day job anytime soon.”

Learn more about SimRated.

All Photos and Graphics: Julie Kennedy, UCI Beall Applied Innovation

The comparative study, which focused on immunity effectiveness of naturally acquiring COVID-19 versus receiving one of the available messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines, like Pfizer and Moderna, has shown that mRNA vaccines are more effective at immunizing against COVID-19 as well as it’s variants versus natural acquisition of the virus.

“Our results show that both mRNA vaccines are spectacular and essentially equivalent to each other,” said Felgner. “The antibody responses induced by these vaccines can shoot up within days after administration suggesting that the vaccine may be useful as a treatment in people who are beginning to experience [COVID-like] symptoms.”

mRNA vaccines “teach” the body’s cells how to create a protein, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Though relatively new technology, the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine injects genetic code that tells the cells to produce the spike protein that surrounds the COVID-19 virus and, according to Felgner’s study — which uses UCI technology available through UCI Beall Applied Innovation’s Research Translation Group — has shown effective results.

The study, which began in February last year, analyzed two sets of data from 3,000 UCI healthcare workers at the UCI Medical Center in Orange in addition to a 7,000-person study in Santa Ana that compared antibody responses from those that acquired COVID-19 infection naturally and those who received the mRNA vaccines.

Felgner’s Coronavirus Antigen Microarray test, developed in March 2020, identifies people who were exposed to the virus and could have been infecting other people. Most of the people who were infected were not tested for COVID-19 and didn’t know that they had it.

According to Felgner, the antibody response induced from natural exposure is not nearly as high as that induced by the vaccine, so those who had COVID-19 should still get the vaccine to improve their immunity. People previously exposed to the virus respond better to the vaccine and have stronger immunity than those never infected before; however, Felgner says those who never had the virus also will receive much higher antibody levels once they receive the vaccine. The mRNA vaccines’ antibody responses also may protect against emerging variants, said Felgner.

The team is also beginning to gather data from the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and according to Felgner, have noted that the antibody levels induced by this vaccine take longer to develop and are lower than the mRNA vaccines.

“These results are consistent with the lower efficacy reported by the developer and with results showing that vaccines are more susceptible to the variants than the mRNA vaccine,” said Felgner. “That said, there is evidence that the [Johnson & Johnson] vaccine reduces the incidence of severe disease and death. Longitudinal studies underway will indicate how durable the responses are for all of the COVID vaccines.”

The study will be peer-reviewed and will determine how long the antibodies will last in addition to the need for booster shots and will compare the different immune responses from the three available COVID-19 vaccines. The team also plans to study immune-compromised patients, whose results indicate lower antibody levels after being vaccinated.

Learn more about Applied Innovation’s Research Translation Group and available UCI technologies.

All Photos: Carlos Puma/Puma Images