Tomorrow, April 26, is World Intellectual Property Day, and PIVOT Center is joining the World Intellectual Property Organization and tech transfer offices from around the world to celebrate.
This year’s focus is “Women and IP: Accelerating innovation and creativity” and celebrating the “can do” attitude of women inventors, creators and entrepreneurs around the world and their ground-breaking work.
Here are just some of the incredible women innovators at the U:
Alana Welm
The odds are high that you know someone who has been impacted by breast cancer. The American Cancer Society estimates 287,850 women were diagnosed with breast cancer and 43,250 women died from breast cancer in 2022. Alana Welm, a University of Utah professor of oncological sciences, is working to lower that number.
”We’re trying to understand more about the deadliest form of breast cancer, which is metastatic breast cancer,” Welm said. “It’s about 20-30% of all breast cancers that eventually become metastatic and we don’t really know which ones those are going to be.”
Allison Payne
Allison Payne says she is “trying to make some small dent in helping people with breast cancer” with her work at the University of Utah. Payne, who joined the university as a professor in the radiology and imaging sciences department in 2011, and her team have designed a breast-specific system for treating breast cancer that completed a first-in-human trial in France with another enrolling at the Huntsman Cancer Institute. The system, a focused ultrasound technology, allows clinicians to conduct an ultrasound inside an MRI and noninvasively manipulate tissues in the body.
“We’re trying to bring advanced, patient-specific imaging for the treatment of breast cancer to give women more options to how they’re treated,” Payne said.
TingTing Hong
As TingTing Hong says, “the career of a researcher is up and down.” Hong, an associate professor of pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Utah, studies the structural organization of cardiomyocyte, or heart muscle cells, and how these structures impact heart function.
In her research, Hong and her lab identified a microdomain organized by a membrane binding protein that helps the heart contract and relax. This microdomain and protein are impaired during heart failure, resulting in worsened cardiac contraction and relaxation. They are now working to target this microdomain using gene therapy to introduce outside genes and proteins to improve cardiac function.
Vanessa Redecke
Moving research from the lab to the market isn’t always a linear path and often involves multiple partnerships to reach the end goal. While some might get discouraged by setbacks, a team of motivated collaborators and a mission to solve a global problem can result in success. For University of Utah immunology and microbiology professors Vanessa Redecke and Hans Haecker, that magic formula led to the creation of a COVID-19 antibody test that uses AI to give faster, more accurate and affordable diagnoses in a point of care setting.
“When COVID hit, we realized there was going to be a dire need for testing, especially for antibody testing, because at the time most people were focusing on antigen testing,” Redecke said.
