Media Watch Archives

Michelle Khine’s latest medtech startup was inspired by one of the scariest moments of her life. In 2018, Khine, a UCI biomedical engineering professor and entrepreneur, was watching her newborn baby being treated for a collapsed lung when she noticed that doctors weren’t monitoring his breathing. As she soon discovered, respiration has long been a neglected vital sign. State-of-the-art monitors are often bulky and can be inaccurate. “I went back and told my students: ‘This is ridiculous!’” she recalls. Khine and one of her doctoral students, Michael Chu, went on to develop a new compact, wireless, noninvasive monitoring device. They launched a new company – the sixth Khine has founded since her grad-student days. Chu is now the CEO. The startup, Makani Science (Makani is Hawaiian for “wind”), has since made speedy progress, thanks to enthusiastic investors and local support from an Irvine accelerator and UCI incubator. Read More

Cartilage, Inc. a bio-medical start up from the University of California, Irvine is developing a product that seeks to avoid such a “catastrophic” outcome for people afflicted with TMJ disorders, co-founder Kyriacos A. Athanasiou told the Business Journal. Athanasiou, a professor of biomedical engineering at UCI, leads the research team developing the startup’s engineering neocartilage implant, Hyaleon. Cartilage officials hope that the implant will restore TMJ function by generating missing tissue and repairing defects in the jaw joint. UCI and Cartilage’s research team last month received a $6 million grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine …. [Subscription required, you can request an electronic copy of the article by sending an email to communications@uci.edu.] Read More

Underneath the rubbery skin of a squid, you’ll find a community of cells and muscles that work together to create the color and texture changes these animals are known for. This buzzing cellular network is difficult to study, however, and marine biologists and other researchers failed to cultivate a squid’s skin cells in a laboratory setting for decades. Now, thanks to recent work done at the University of California, Irvine, a workaround for culturing similar skin cells has been achieved. … To [UCI associate] professor Alon Gorodetsky and his team, the reflectin proteins seemed the perfect biomolecule for forming similar particles in mammalian (human) cells. Read More  

Rahim Esfandyar‑Pour, Assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science and biomedical engineering, UC Irvine. Esfandyar-Pour and his team have invented a health-monitoring wearable many times thinner than a human hair – that operates without a battery. Read More