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New Scientific Discoveries Yield Impressive Real-World Applications
From dentistry to medicine to electric vehicles, Temple University researchers expand the frontiers of knowledge and translate their findings into solutions that hold the power to change lives.
Philadelphia is widely recognized as one of the nation’s leading centers for innovation and research, fueled by flourishing technology, education, medicine, and life sciences sectors.
At the heart of this thriving landscape, Temple University serves as a vital anchor. With a culture deeply rooted in innovation, the institution fosters an environment where a community of faculty, researchers, entrepreneurs, and investors turns ideas into reality. Together, they advance new products to the marketplace and found companies with societal impact.
From new treatments for autoimmune disorders and gum disease to life-saving solutions for blood clots and electric vehicle safety, Temple researchers are at the forefront of science that matters. Here, we spoke with four teams that grew out of Temple’s robust innovation ecosystem about how their products and technologies aim to make a big difference in the world. And right here in Philly.
A Rapid, Lifesaving Solution for Dangerous Blood Clots
Dr. Riyaz Bashir has developed a novel technology to treat potentially deadly pulmonary embolisms, in a groundbreaking procedure that may be completed in less than an hour.
Pulmonary embolisms — blood clots that commonly form in the deep veins of the legs, then break off and travel into the vessels of the lungs — are gargantuan. Many times the size of other clots, and their sheer mass present a unique challenge for treatment: the amount of blood-thinning medication needed to dissolve them can also lead to excessive bleeding and time in the ICU, as a result.
“We learned that if you fissure a clot to allow the patient’s own healthy blood to flow through it and combine this with a small dose of clot-dissolving medicine, that rapidly dissolves it.”
Pulmonary embolisms — blood clots that commonly form in the deep veins of the legs, then break off and travel into the vessels of the lungs — are gargantuan. Many times the size of clots that cause a stroke, and their sheer mass, present a unique challenge for treatment: the amount of blood-thinning medication needed to dissolve them can also lead to excessive bleeding and time in the ICU, as a result.
Dr. Riyaz Bashir, a professor at Temple University’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine and a cardiologist at Temple University Hospital, was treating patients with embolisms at his practice day after day when he thought of a better treatment strategy than what was available at the time. He cofounded Thrombolex Inc. to develop and commercialize a solution to the challenge. The BASHIR™ Endovascular Catheter consists of an expandable infusion basket that, when inserted into the site of the clot, cuts multiple fissures through the clot’s mass to immediately restore the flow of blood.
“We learned that if you allow a patient’s own healthy blood to flow through a clot, that rapidly dissolves it,” Bashir says, “because it brings the body’s own clot-dissolving chemicals into the clot.” Clot-busting drugs can then be injected directly at the site, delivering targeted relief and reducing the risk of side effects. In independent studies, treatment with the catheter can be completed in less than an hour, compared to five hours for traditional methods that require an ICU admission. The procedure also resulted in a 29% reduction in the size of the blockage in just 48 hours. The device is now FDA-approved.
About one-in-one-thousand people will develop a PE; the rate is consistent across different countries and demographics. One of the key benefits of this innovative technology is its ease of use. “My goal was that it should also benefit developing countries where they don’t have the advanced facilities we do in the U.S.,” Bashir says. In the United States, a few hundred thousand people annually stand to benefit from his invention. “For eight billion people worldwide,” he says, “you can do the math as to how many lives we could potentially save.”
Learn more about Dr. Riyaz Bashir’s work on treating pulmonary embolisms.
A New, More Natural Approach to Drug Discovery
Drs. Mark Feitelson and Alla Arzumanyan are using substances produced by the body to treat hepatitis, liver disease, and more.
Much ink has been spilled in recent years about the importance of gut biomes. It’s often reported that the balance of good bacteria in our digestive tracts can affect everything from the strength of our immune systems to our energy levels and mood. But that may only be scratching the surface of what’s possible with the molecules in our gut. Researchers are discovering that gut metabolites may have broader applications, like being used to treat conditions affecting other parts of the body including the skin, the liver, and the colon.
SFA Therapeutics Inc., co founded by the Temple University researchers Mark Feitelson and Alla Arzumanyan, is drawing upon gut metabolites to treat disease and to advance our understanding of just how wide-ranging their applications may be. “The idea first came to me in about 2013,” Feitelson, a professor of biology in Temple’s College of Science and Technology, says. “We came across a scientific article about using bacterial metabolites to treat mice with colitis. And I thought, that’s very interesting. You can give these things to a mouse orally, and it acts in the intestine; but what about everywhere else?”
“The nice thing about these substances is we don’t have to optimize them, evolution already has. This is a fundamentally different way of thinking about how to discover and develop drugs.”
In his research, Feitelson saw promising results in using metabolites to treat viral hepatitis and chronic liver disease. “It turns out a lot of the bad players involved in inflammation in the liver overlap with the bad players elsewhere,” Feitelson says. It was Arzumanyan’s idea to attempt treating psoriasis. In phase one trials, 92% of patients experienced improvement, and the team now has an array of patents for their compounds. They are exploring treatments for rheumatoid arthritis, leukemia, and lung damage caused by COVID-19 infection, among other diseases.
One of the big advantages of SFA’s work is the potential for fewer side effects compared with traditional treatments. “The nice thing about these substances is we don’t have to optimize them, evolution already has. This is a fundamentally different way of thinking about how to discover and develop drugs, and that’s why we think it’s also applicable to many different types of diseases,” Feitelson says. Compared to conventional drugs, SFA’s treatments act more harmoniously with the body. “The defining feature of our drug is modulation, rather than suppression,” Arzumanyan, an associate professor in Temple’s College of Science and Technology, says. “When big pharma companies design a drug, they usually pick a molecule and design a drug that suppresses it below the baseline, causing side effects. Our drug brings them back to what they should be normally.”
Ensuring the Safety of Electric Cars, for a Greener World
Dr. Elham Sahraei seeks to understand how lithium batteries respond during a collision.
As the world rapidly adopts the use of batteries over fossil fuels, safety is at the front of many people’s minds. Stories about an electric car catching fire garner outsized attention from media and consumers, because the technology is new and unfamiliar — even if the risks aren’t any greater compared with gas-powered vehicles. Understanding and improving the safety of electric batteries isn’t important just for protecting users, it’s also crucial for accelerating their mainstream adoption and reducing overall carbon emissions.
“Because this is new technology, it’s less understood than conventional vehicles.”
Elham Sahraei, an associate professor in Temple’s College of Engineering, is the director of the university’s Electric Vehicle Safety Lab, dedicated to understanding what happens to electric batteries under extreme stress. The lab’s experiments investigate what happens to batteries, like the kind that are used in electric vehicles, when they’re impacted or punctured. The evidence gleaned from these experiments is combined with government vehicle crash safety data in order to model how the battery pack in a car is likely to behave during a collision. “Because this is new technology, it’s less understood than conventional vehicles,” Sahraei says. “The industry is very cautious, [and] trying to add lots of protection around the batteries to compensate for that lack of understanding.”
A better understanding of what the riskiest scenarios are for electric vehicles will produce better protections. Think of how passenger safety has improved for gas-powered cars: these vehicles were once rigid steel boxes, but now, modern cars include crumple zones that absorb and redirect the force of a crash around the driver and the passengers. Sahraei and her team’s work entails producing similar concepts for protecting batteries. Now incubating at iNest, Temple’s innovation hub, her early stage startup, Inovele LLC, is providing models and testing for vehicle makers to simulate and assess the performance of their own designs. It’s a vital step for enticing us all into a cleaner, greener world.
Learn more about Elham Sahraei’s work innovating for safer roadways.
A Revolutionary Nonsurgical Treatment for Periodontal Disease
Drs. Santiago Orrego and Carolina Montoya’s gel uses electricity harnessed by the movement of the jaw to treat periodontal disease by growing bone and controlling infection.
It sounds straight out of science fiction: a miraculous gel that helps the body regrow bone in the periodontal pocket. One weird thing about the human body is how it naturally regrows some parts, but not others: your hair comes back when cut, your bones will heal from breaks, but your teeth — not so much. Gum disease occurs when microbes trigger gum inflammation, causing the underlying bone to begin a process of self-destruction. In advanced cases, the bone below the tooth dies, leading the tooth to fall out. Current periodontitis treatments involve surgery, but now, there is a nonsurgical solution.
Ambilux Dental Gel, a smart hydrogel, developed by Drs. Santiago Orrego and Carolina Montoya at Temple University, aims to reverse the effects of gum disease when deposited in the space between the gum and teeth. The gel contains piezoelectric materials, which convert the movement of one’s jaw into an electrical charge that stimulates bone growth. All it takes is a few squirts with a syringe. Oral Biolife Inc. licensed the technology from Temple and is among the first to translate piezoelectric materials for dentistry. Their novel product is the result of many moving parts and paths of research, combining dentistry and engineering.
“We work closely with practicing dentists to produce bioengineering-driven solutions for the challenges they face in the clinic.”
Orrego, an assistant professor with dual appointments in Temple’s Kornberg School of Dentistry and College of Engineering, originally worked with piezoelectrics in his postdoctoral studies — developing, for example, a flag that generated enough electricity to charge batteries when it fluttered. Later, he began collaborating with Montoya, a research associate in Kornberg’s Smart Biomaterials Lab, to apply those materials to treating dental disease. “Inside the body, employing piezoelectricity is a fairly new concept,” Montoya says. “Carolina and I are engineers by training,” Orrego says. “We work closely with lots of practicing dentists to create the synergy to produce solutions for the difficult dental challenges they face.”
And the benefits don’t stop at humans: periodontal disease affects about 80% of dogs, making this technology a potentially groundbreaking veterinary treatment, for the health of everyone’s good boys and girls — a promising enough prospect to make anyone smile.
Dennis Tang is a journalist, a novelist, and a creative writing professor based in Brooklyn, New York.