ALABAMA: Heart disease: $2.6M NIH grant to UAB will fund study of safer, more durable stents
The NIH has awarded $2.6M to two University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers who co-founded the spinoff Endomimetics to design a better stent.
Ho-Wook Jun, PhD, is principal investigator in the grant, and Brigitta Brott, MD, is the co-investigator. They are co-founders of Endomimetics and have worked together for a decade to develop their bionanomatrix material for coating stents to improve heart disease treatment. Their material has other potential applications in patients with brain aneurysms, kidney dialysis patients and patients with percutaneous osteointegrated prostheses.
Ho-Wook Jun and Brigitta Brott are using techniques licensed by Endomimetics to develop a new stent coating material that may also help patients with brain aneurysms, kidney failure needing kidney dialysis and percutaneous osteointegrated prostheses, in addition to heart disease.
“This public-private partnership of UAB and Endomimetics is an excellent example of the way publicly funded research can be translated to tangible products and services that will significantly improve the lives of the people in both Alabama and the world,” Jun said. At UAB, Jun is a professor in the UAB Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Brott is an interventional cardiologist and professor in the UAB Department of Medicine Division of Cardiovascular Disease. At Endomimetics, Jun is chief scientific officer, and Brott is chief medical officer.