News & Events

Surgical Innovations (SI) held its annual retreat for the first time virtually on August 28, 2020. Participants were SI leadership, faculty, engineers, Biodevice Innovation Fellows, students, and other collaborators. Introductory remarks were made by the faculty directors Dr. Hanmin Lee and Dr. Shuvo Roy, who highlighted the importance of brainstorming broadly, working with others across disciplines, and looking outside of traditional, medical-technology spaces and to lower-resource settings for innovative solutions when faced with problems. The team then went over various ongoing research [...]

Surgical Innovations Welcomes Three New Biodevice Innovation Fellows Surgical Innovations welcomed three new Biodevice Innovation Fellows in July- Caressa Chen, MD (Loyola University Medical Center), Mohammad Karimzada, MD (University of California, San Francisco), and Young Lee, MD (University of California, San Francisco. The Biodevice Innovation Pathway provides rigorous hands-on research experiences developing and translating novel medical devices and technologies for unmet clinical needs alongside surgical innovators, bioengineering faculty and graduate students, and device industry [...]

Three surgical residents complete the UCSF Biodevice Innovation fellowship UCSF Surgical Innovations (SI) takes this opportunity to congratulate three fellows – Vamsi K Aribindi, MD (Baylor College of Medicine), Rebecca C. Gologorsky, MD (UCSF East Bay Residency Program) and Phillip Kim, MD, MBA (Columbia University), on their hard work and dedication, as they successfully complete the Biodevice Innovation training. UCSF Biodevice Innovation program, funded by a NIH R25 grant from NIBIB, provides surgical residents with focused training for 2 years in medical research, device development, [...]

A research team including UCSF pediatric surgeons Dr. Olajire Idowu and Dr. Sunghoon Kim has been awarded a grant to support commercialization of the "Prolapse Whisperer", a novel medical device to treat and prevent recurrent stomal prolapse. Stomal prolapse occurs when the bowel near the stoma, a surgically created intestinal opening, intussuscepts from within causing possible bowel obstruction and  ischemia (restriction in blood supply to tissues). Current treatments include manual reduction by force or a surgical procedure. Unfortunately, neither is durable and additional recurrences are [...]

On March 30, 2020, 10 finalists virtually pitched their pediatric device ideas to a panel of judges at the UCSF-Stanford Pediatric Device Accelerator Shark Tank pitch competition for a chance to win up to $50,000, prototyping support, and customized advising. Congratulations to the awardees, and special thanks to our judges. Thanks to FDA (Office of Orphan Products Development) and UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals for the funding support! PLATINUM AWARD - $50,000 Eclipse Regenesis, Inc. – Distraction enterogenesis for short bowel syndrome GOLD AWARDS- $30,000 myka bio – [...]

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, have bypassed external devices and instead focused on developing a kidney prototype that they hope will one day be surgically implanted into a patient's body. It wouldn't require a pump because it would be attached to key arteries and powered by blood pressure, says Vanderbilt nephrologist William Fissell, who co-directs the research with UCSF's Shuvo Roy.

The Kidney Project, a national effort to develop an implantable bioartificial kidney that could eliminate the need for dialysis, announced a key milestone in a November 7 presentation at the American Society of Nephrology Kidney Week 2019 conference in Washington, DC. The project team reported that UC San Francisco scientists successfully implanted a prototype kidney bioreactor containing functional human kidney cells in large animals without significant safety concerns. The device, which is about the size of a deck of cards, did not trigger an immune reaction or cause blood clots, an [...]

As one of 15 inaugural winners of the KidneyX Redesign Dialysis Phase I competition, announced April 29, 2019 in Washington DC, a team led by UCSF's Shuvo Roy, PhD, and VUMC nephrologist William Fissell, MD, will receive $75,000 to accelerate the development of their proposed implantable dialysis device. More importantly, they will work closely with leadership of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Medicare, and HHS to accelerate the translation of their concept into a patient-ready device. KidneyX will award $500,000 to three teams as part of Phase II of the competition in the [...]

Insoo Suh, M.D., is a former Assistant Professor of Surgery at UCSF and Co-Founder of Prescient Surgical. After completing a fellowship in endocrine surgery at UCSF, Dr. Suh particiated in the Stanford University Biodesign Innovation Fellowship program in 2011 before joining faculty at UCSF. We sat down with him to learn more about his journey as a physician-innovator. Tell me about a device you're working on and the problem you're trying to address. Laparoscopy and other minimally invasive techniques have revolutionized our field in so many ways, but there definitely still remains room for [...]

Julius Guccione, Jr., Ph.D., Professor of Surgery and Co-Director of the UCSF Cardiac Biomechanics Lab, was inducted into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows at its annual meeting in Washington, DC, on March 25, 2019. Guccione was one of four UCSF faculty members inducted this year. Comprised of just the top two percent of engineers in the field, election to the AIMBE College of Fellows is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to medical and biological engineers. Guccione's research focuses on the development of devices for [...]

Michael Harrison, MD, Professor Emeritus of Surgery, Pediatrics, Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Shuvo Roy, PhD, Professor of Bioengineering & Therapeutic Sciences at UCSF, and James Wall, MD, Assistant Professor of Surgery at Stanford University have been awarded a five-year $6.7 million Pediatric Device Consortia (PDC) P50 grant from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The UCSF-Stanford PDC is one of five centers selected to participate in the national program aimed at accelerating the development [...]

UCSF Surgical Innovations and San Francisco-based medical device developer TheraNova have formed a partnership that will allow for co-development of medical device technologies between them. UCSF innovators will now have a streamlined mechanism to collaborate with TheraNova engineers, which will help speed commercialization of products. The agreement formalizes a longstanding collaborative relationship between Surgical Innovations and TheraNova, providing access to the respective expertise and capabilities of each group, notably: The partnership agreement establishes mechanisms for [...]

Academic hospitals have all the makings for rich medical device development. They have physicians to identify surgical needs, researchers to test theories, bioengineers to design and create devices and patients to participate in clinical trials. However, the disconnect between engineering and surgical departments makes innovation a challenge. So does surgeons' all-consuming job Number One—treating patients. Providing the Infrastructure for Surgeons to Innovate Surgical Innovations, part of the University of California, San Francisco's Department of Surgery and Bioengineering & [...]

On May 17, the Second Annual UCSF Engineering for Children's Health Symposium was held at Mission Bay Conference Center. Over one hundred clinicians, engineers, scientists, administrators, industry professionals, and government partners gathered to discuss groundbreaking research and developing technologies in pediatric medicine. The event commenced with opening remarks by Hanmin Lee, MD, Surgeon-in-Chief of the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals and Professor and Chief of the UCSF Division of Pediatric Surgery, along with Bertram Lubin, MD, Associate Dean of Children's Health at UCSF, [...]

The UCSF Department of Surgery now ranks No. 3 nationally in NIH research funding among all academic surgery programs, a stunning rise from 6th the last time the survey was done. Three Department of Surgery faculty also ranked in the top 20 of all NIH-funded principal investigators nationally in the category of surgery. The highly respected Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research utilized data from the Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tool (RePORT) to survey U.S. medical schools for their NIH funding levels between October 1, 2016 to September 30, 2017. UCSF was the top public recipient [...]

Kidney failure is a debilitating and ultimately deadly illness, and a health policy crisis. With 468,000 people on dialysis in the U.S., costing the government $31 billion dollars a year, very little money is spent on researching alternatives to current treatments. Wired magazine's Megan Molteni visited Shuvo Roy, PhD, to check in on the progress of the implantable artificial kidney, which has been in the works for more than 20 years. Roy is a faculty member in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, a joint department of the UCSF Schools of Pharmacy and [...]

On Tuesday, November 14, the UCSF Pediatric Device Consortium (PDC) held its inaugural Pediatric Device Accelerator Pitch Competition at UCSF's Mission Bay campus. The competition awarded a total of $252,500, funded by FDA's Office of Orphan Products Development and the UCSF Department of Surgery, to teams developing novel medical devices for children. Eight finalists, selected from a pool of 55 applicants from across the world, had just under 10 minutes to pitch their product ideas to a judges' panel of five industry professionals: Mike Billig (CEO of Experien Group), Dan Burnett [...]

At the heart of the UC Berkeley-UCSF Master of Translational Medicine (MTM) program is a hands-on capstone project, where student teams work on developing medical technologies from idea to bedside. Three Surgical Innovations Accelerator projects from the Spring 2017 cycle have been selected to participate in the program this year: Percutaneous AV Fistula, Tracheostomy Alarm, and Augmented Surgical Vision, adding to a lengthy list of Surgical Innovations (SI) projects that have hosted MTM student teams. Since MTM's launch in 2010, eight SI projects comprised of MTM students have been [...]

The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), one of the National Institutes of Health, has awarded bioengineering professor Shuvo Roy, PhD, a three-year, $2.4 million grant to develop a bioartificial pancreas for treatment of Type 1 Diabetes. The project is a collaboration between the Department of Surgery, Department of Bioengineering & Therapeutic Sciences, and Diabetes Center at UCSF. Co-investigators include: Tejal Desai, PhD - Department of Bioengineering & Therapeutic Sciences Matthias Hebrok, PhD - Diabetes Center at UCSF Andrew Posselt, MD, [...]

Results from the first-in-human clinical trial of a magnetic compression anastomosis device known as "Magnamosis" were recently reported on in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.  The study, led by Principal Investigator Michael Harrison, MD, is a prospective, single-center, first-in-human pilot clinical trial to evaluate the feasibility and safety of creating an intestinal anastomosis using the Magnamosis device. Magnetic compression anastomosis (magnamosis) uses a pair of self-centering magnetic "Harrison Rings" to create an intestinal anastomosis without sutures or [...]