Nine WashU student-lead ventures are finalists set to compete for $22,500 in awards in the 2020 Skandalaris Venture Competition (SVC) later this month. This week, we are publishing Q&A articles to feature each venture team. Today’s featured team is Urogix.

About Urogix

Urogix designed an implant that will be delivered through the urethra to push on the prostate and mechanically dilate the urinary channel. After consulting recent literature about the lower urinary tract, we decided to focus on the anterior channel of the prostate, which is responsible for allowing urine flow, instead of the posterior channel. Our arch-shaped implant can be safely placed at the anterior channel, dilating obstructive lateral lobes of the prostate. Unlike conventional thermal energy-based surgeries, our approach does not propagate any thermal damage to prostatic tissue. This helps minimize intraoperative bleeding and postoperative sphincter dysfunction due to thermal damage.

Industry: Medical Device

Number of Employees: Six (two co-founders and four team members)

Total Funding (as of March 2020): $2,300

What problem are you solving?

Prostate enlargement, technically known as BPH, causes urinary problems for 500 million men worldwide. Current BPH medications relieve the symptoms only temporarily, while surgeries can have severe complications or high costs for patients. We are developing a cost-effective BPH treatment that is without complications to make it more available and accessible for BPH patients.

About the Founding Team:

• Raphael Chung is in the Master of Engineering in Biomedical Innovation program. He is interested in the translation of biomedical engineering principles into devices and worked as an intern at a medical device startup company.
• Kevin Park is in the Master of Engineering in Biomedical Innovation program. He worked as a clinical specialist for a medical device company.
• Noah Basri is currently pursuing an MD degree at Washington University School of Medicine. His passion lies in making and riding waves of innovation in healthcare.
• Igor Luzhansky is a Ph.D. student in Materials Science and Engineering with a focus on cell–biomaterial interactions. He worked as a research technician in the Langer Lab at MIT, was previously on a healthcare startup team that was selected to compete in the Rice Business Plan Competition and is the lead author or co-author of three scientific articles and an invention disclosure in the field of bioengineering.
• Frank Moon is an undergraduate student studying Computer Science. As a prospective master’s student in computer science, his strengths are in logical thinking and understanding complex multi-agent systems. He joined the Urogix team as a friend, a practicalist, and an enthusiast for ideas that improve the well-being of many.
• David Weinstein is a third-year medical student at Saint Louis University School of Medicine. He is interested in a career in Urology, and this project sparked his interest due to its ability to revolutionize BPH treatment.

What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned since starting your venture?

We learned that working with physicians helps us figure out the feasibility of an idea very quickly. Since the beginning of our project, we have talked with many urologists. We considered them as potential users of our product and listened to their feedback to mitigate potential problems.

Also, we want to emphasize market size. In the medical device industry, the market size can either attract or disappoint investors, regardless of the feasibility of an idea. The BPH surgical device market can easily exceed 7 billion dollars annually, and this fact allowed many investors to dive into the BPH surgical market. It is important to have a good understanding of the serviceable available market and estimate the serviceable obtainable market.

Another lesson we learned is to be able to make even non-experts understand the underlying mechanism of our products. Most of the time, when we are presenting our idea, the judges or the audience are from non-engineering backgrounds. Initially, we had a difficult time explaining our idea in a comprehensible way to non-expert judges and confused them. Later, we made a short video that clearly explained our product, and this helped us keep the audience interested. While we perfectly understand our product, we should also be able to help the audiences understand it even if they are not experts in the related fields.

What do you love about being an entrepreneur?

It is exciting to identify a problem and create your own solutions for the problem. It might seem difficult to tackle current solutions since they are usually being widely used already and are well-understood. However, we felt that there are always problems in current solutions, which gives us a chance to tackle them. The BPH market has grown since 1980, and many large companies such as Medtronic, Olympus, or Boston Scientific are now in the BPH market. So far, however, none of those companies have dominated the market for more than three years, and newer solutions have replaced gold standards. We are always excited to see new solutions. Creating solutions ourselves to potentially replace the current solutions is what we love about being an entrepreneur.

What words of advice do you have for those interested in starting a business?

Make sure you know what the actual need or problem is. Do your market research and talk to the stakeholders. Make sure your solution solves the stakeholders' needs or problems.

Website: bphimplant.weebly.com