The Biotech Launch Pad Fellows are disrupting the traditionally slow and circuitous pathway from academic research to commercialization. Rather than navigating the difficulties in publishing and funding as individual scientists, they are participating in a large-scale initiative, Rice’s Biotech Launch Pad — an initiative designed to efficiently advance the university’s health and medical technology discoveries into clinical studies and commercialization.

“We are inventing the future of medicine — a future that is transformed by considering scalability and cost at the earliest stages of innovation,” explained Omid Veiseh, professor of bioengineering and the faculty director of the Biotech Launch Pad.

Omid is mentoring the first cohort of the Biotech Launch Pad Fellows, sharing his comprehensive vision to bridge the gap between laboratory research and its practical application in clinical settings. Omid’s strategy begins with clinicians — talking to them and identifying needs. “From there you are designing the clinical trial,” Omid said. “You’re designing manufacturing. You're designing regulatory strategy, a patent, an investigational product strategy. We can do this in five-year cycles. Normally it could take up to 12. This is going to increase impact and attract top-tier talent to Rice.”

Omid is sharing his extensive expertise with the Biotech Launch Pad Fellows, guiding their research efforts to ensure solutions are brought to market. Read the following stories to see just how these talented scientists are working to solve intractable problems in women’s health care.

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Martha Fowler ’24 | Alisha Menon | Samira Aghlara-Fotovat ’25 and
Samantha Fleury ’25

The Solution:

At Rice, Martha Fowler ’24, a doctoral student in Omid’s bioengineering lab, has been working on a new biomaterial that will initiate lymphatic regeneration — an idea that caught the attention of clinicians at MD Anderson Cancer Center as a possible treatment for lymphedema.

Martha’s solution proposes a cell therapy platform, delivered via hydrogel, that recruits and regrows lymphatic vessels, routing them toward healthy lymph nodes. The hydrogel is placed just under the skin in a minimally invasive procedure.

“In wound healing, blood vessels regrow, bringing needed nutrients to the site,” Fowler explained. “But once those vessels bring cells to that area, only the lymphatic system can carry away the waste, which is an important part of the body’s immune response. We are using a cell therapy platform that produces a factor to regenerate and direct lymph vessels.”

Martha is expecting her product to reach clinical trials by 2026. Along the way, Omid and his team are consulting on safety and efficacy, manufacturing, and initial meetings with the FDA to help guide trial strategies.

The Solution:

The partnership between Rice and TMC has given Alisha Menon, a postdoctoral researcher, the opportunity to shadow nurses in the NICU and to fully conceptualize the processes involved in caring for and monitoring premature babies.

Alisha is developing a completely wireless monitoring system for the NICU, replacing the three-lead ECG that picks up respiratory rate, temperature, heart rate and blood oxygenation levels. “Adapting wearable technology for the NICU produces significant design challenges that remote monitoring applications don't face. We have to provide ICU-grade sensor data and constantly stream at high resolution to hospital monitors, all without increasing sensor surface area to avoid additional stress on fragile neonatal skin,” Alisha explained. “ECG is typically sampled at approximately 200 hertz in a remote setting and stored locally on the device for later upload. The NICU requires 500Hz, and nurses need access to the data in real time. If you want to collect and transmit that quality of data on a wearable sensor without significantly changing device size or weight, you need to think very carefully about how you are going to manage your battery life.”

Alisha’s version two prototype is about 3 inches in diameter, but the goal for version three is to make the device the size of a quarter. Her goal is to start studies on 10-20 patients this fall, with the goal of demonstrating equivalency between her system and the wired system currently used in the NICU.

The Solution:

The Veiseh lab works extensively on the idea of a cell-based cytokine factory that produces a pro-inflammatory response in order to kickstart the immune system to attack cancer cells. Conceptually, the same platform can be manipulated to treat an inflammatory disease, like endometriosis, by doing the opposite — turning off the immune system.

“You engineer the cells to produce the therapeutic (designed to turn off the immune response), and then you encapsulate those cells in hydrogel and deliver them to the peritoneal cavity, where the majority of the disease is found,” Samantha described. “We envision this treatment being used in a patient who is undergoing a laparoscopic procedure where the lesions are being excised — that way you are preventing any additional lesions from forming.”

Samira and Samantha are intent on their product going to market within five years. “We are lucky to be following behind other projects from Omid’s lab,” Samantha said. “The general idea of encapsulated cell therapy has been brought to clinical trials already, which shows us the pathway forward.”