 photo credit: UC Davis Graduate School of Management
ViVita Technologies, a startup founded by Veterinary Medicine Professor and Athanasiou Lab collaborator Leigh Griffiths and BME Ph.D. students Regina MacBarb, Jeni Lee, and Maelene Wong, won the Big Bang! Business Plan Competition. Big Bang! is the annual UC Davis Business Plan Competition organized by MBA students of the Graduate School of Management. The goal of the contest is to promote entrepreneurship at UC Davis and the region supported by the University. The winner receives funds to invest in their business. ViVita Technologies plans to circumvent the major flaws in current animal-derived heart valve replacements by implementing a new approach to tissue preparation. They have developed a patent-pending process that removes the major components of the material responsible for stimulating the recipients’ immune response while preserving the tissue’s structural integrity and functional properties. Following application of this process, recipient cells are able to repopulate the material, thus creating living replacement tissues capable of integration and growth. ViVita’s tissue preparation process, therefore, creates tissue replacements that last the lifetime of our patients. Learn more about ViVita here: http://istart.org/startup-idea/business/vivita-technologies-inc/12444 ViVita is one of the resident companies of the Engineering Translational Technology Center (ETTC), the technology incubator at the College of Engineering at UC Davis. |
