Archive for category: News

695 Physicians | 84 Specialties

This year’s Physician’s of Excellence were judged by the Orange County Medical Association to be among the most accomplished and caring.

DERMATOLOGY
Kristen M. Kelly
Laser surgery, vascular birthmarks
Irvine
949-824-5515

FACIAL PLASTIC AND RECONSTRUCTIVE SURGERY
Brian J. F. Wong
Rhinoplasty, revision rhinoplasty, nasal reconstruction
Irvine
714-456-7017

NEUROLOGY
Yama Akbari
Neurocritical care, coma, consciousness, cardiac arrest
Irvine
949-824-1888

Mark J. Fisher
Stroke
Orange
714-456-5091

Click here to see full listing in Orange Coast Magazine.

Using light projections to see beneath the skin, Modulim’s device detects subtle changes in a diabetic patient’s microvascular circulation.

By Jill Kato, UC Irvine Beall Applied Innovation, December 17, 2024

By reducing the need for diabetes-related amputations, Modulim is poised to achieve the biotech trifecta: improve patient outcomes, deliver cost-savings to insurance companies, and streamline physicians’ workload.

David Cuccia will never forget sitting in Professor Bruce Tromberg‘s office with a group of faculty when the conversation shifted to the future of their research. A company had recently approached UC Irvine to license their technology and Cuccia, then a graduate student, turned to the faculty to ask what they planned to do about the offer.

“David, we’re faculty,” they said. “The question is, what are you going to do about it?’”

Cuccia realized he wasn’t interested in licensing the technology to someone else. Instead, he logged on to Legal Zoom to set up his own company for $250 that night.

That company was Modulated Imaging Inc., now known as Modulim, a medical device startup focused on preserving human limbs with medical imaging technology. With Cuccia as chief technology officer, Modulim is set to bring transformative changes to the field of diabetes care.

Curiosity Meets Innovation

Cuccia first arrived at UC Irvine as a freshman and lived at The Shire in the Middle Earth dorms. Initially, he saw himself becoming a doctor. Since he liked science and helping people, he assumed this would be his path. But after witnessing his first surgery, Cuccia knew medicine wasn’t for him. He switched to physics and joined Tromberg’s lab. The undergraduate research he conducted there eventually grew into Modulim, a venture that would come to define his career.

As Cuccia began planning for life after graduation, Professor Anthony Durkin suggested that writing a few more papers could allow him to quickly earn a Ph.D. Taking this advice, Cuccia decided to stay on and pursue his doctorate. Durkin was right about the timeframe. The average time to complete a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering is five to six years. Cuccia earned his in three and a half.

At the time, researchers at the Beckman Laser Institute had spotted a fascinating new trend. Combining near-infrared light and digital projectors, the researchers were able to capture extensive information about tissue in a novel manner. Cuccia and his colleagues invented Spatial Frequency Domain Imaging (SFDI), a non-invasive light-based imaging technique that can capture data on oxygen levels and hemoglobin concentrations in the skin. Instead of a single data point, SFDI captures whole images and examines tissue up to five millimeters deep. Moreover, it’s much quicker than other assessment methods, delivering widefield results in seconds without exposing patients to harmful radiation.

While a graduate student, Cuccia successfully applied for Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grants. By the time he graduated, he was able to transition from a Ph.D. student to a principal investigator with his own company. He also discovered that other researchers wanted to buy devices like the one he had built in the lab.

As Cuccia transitioned from graduate student to founder of a startup, Amaan Mazhar arrived at UC Irvine to start his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering. This turned out to be serendipitous. Not only was Mazhar interested in Cuccia’s work, but he was passionate about solving real-world problems.

“The growth of knowledge and technology development was fueled by Amaan. He was director of research, building the devices, and in charge of clinical collaborations. He’s been my partner in crime from the beginning,” says Cuccia. Mazhar now serves as Modulim’s CEO.

In his pitch to the first round of investors, Cuccia introduced a versatile platform with a diverse range of potential applications. Because the technology provided a lens into the properties of tissue and materials, potential applications included improving outcomes of surgical procedures, advancing wound care, and even streamlining fruit inspection. Out of the gate, Cuccia and Mazhar wanted to make sure they helped the most people and made the biggest impact. Their challenge lay in figuring out where to focus their attention first.

Revolutionizing Diabetic Foot Care

Through their clinical collaborations, Cuccia and Mazhar learned more about the scale of the amputation epidemic. Every 20 seconds a person with diabetes undergoes a lower-limb amputation. Poor circulation in diabetes patients starves tissue of nutrients and leads to a breakdown of the skin, which results in chronic ulcers. Nerve damage, a common complication of diabetes, often masks the symptoms of these ulcers. As a result, patients may not even know they have an issue until a chronic ulcer has formed, leading to infection, gangrene, and hospitalizations. In severe cases, this can lead to the need for amputation.

In addition to the personal trauma of losing part of a lower limb, amputations come with significant financial costs. In total, the treatment of diabetic limb-related complications costs about $17 billion in the United States, which is more than the top five most costly cancers.

In a healthcare system that prioritizes treating acute conditions over preventative care, busy physicians often lack the resources to perform foot assessments on all diabetes patients. While it’s possible to train other healthcare personnel to conduct these exams, the current approach still isn’t ideal, since it is highly subjective and dependent on level of skill and interpretation. To effectively address this healthcare gap, Modulim plans to take the subjectivity and guesswork out of diabetic foot exams and make them widely available.

While light is ubiquitous in wearable devices like Fitbits and Apple watches, Modulim’s device uses light projections to see beneath the skin, detecting subtle changes in a patient’s microvascular circulation. Cuccia’s team is developing a handheld version of the technology that is about the size and shape of a smartphone, where a technician with minimal training could operate it in community settings. The device would be compact enough for healthcare personnel to carry in their bags, allowing them to bring it on home visits or to nursing homes.

Integrating a Multidisciplinary Problem

Besides subjectivity, accessibility, and cost, Modulim’s technology tackles another critical aspect of the amputation crisis. Diabetic foot care is a complex, multidisciplinary problem involving physicians from various specialties. A patient with diabetes could potentially see a primary care physician, an endocrinologist, a nephrologist, a vascular medicine specialist, and a podiatrist. Their provision of care often remains fragmented, with no single discipline taking lead.

“We can bridge these specialties by introducing an objective and quantifiable assessment that everyone can use,” says Mazhar.

To complement the device, Modulim has developed cloud-based software to help clinicians in care-management, to help track patients, monitor their microvascular changes, and to share insights within an organization. The device, combined with the algorithm and cloud-based software, has the potential to greatly enhance front-line diabetic care.

Collaborative Roots

The first office space Modulim used was, in fact, a converted printer closet. To help get the startup off the ground, UC Irvine faculty rearranged their postdocs so Cuccia and Mazhar could have a small space. Humble as it was, they were grateful for the “office,” especially since it was in UC Irvine’s Beckman Laser Institute, where groundbreaking work like theirs was taking place.

“Maybe they helped with the space out of pity, but I’m thankful for it,” says Cuccia. “I felt like we had a hundred percent support from everyone all of the time. They wanted to make this happen for us.”

In moving the invention from a university research discovery into a product in the private sector, Cuccia appreciates the freedom and fairness of the deals he’s made with UC Irvine through UCI Beall Applied Innovation.

“They gave us a long leash in terms of the initial fund repayment timeline. They understood that our need for cash was critical. This gave us a solid foundation to find the right fit,” he says.

As a licensing officer for UCI Beall Applied Innovation, Alvin Viray ensured that Cuccia had the support and resources he needed to protect and commercialize his Ph.D. research.

“It has been incredibly rewarding to see his ideas grow into a venture that has real potential to impact the health industry and patients,” Viray says.

These resources and support have generated a lot of loyalty from Cuccia and Mazhar. Even for a UC Irvine-born and incubated startup, their connection and loyalty to the university is deep. They take part in round tables and advisory boards. Their workforce includes a significant number of UC Irvine alumni. They work closely with UC Irvine Beall Applied Innovation by mentoring other startups and by speaking at events. Cuccia serves on the Campuswide Honors Collegium advisory board and Mazhar reviews Proof of Product (PoP) grants in his spare time. Both Mazhar and Cuccia even met their spouses while students at UC Irvine.

“UCI remains supportive of us, and we do our best to contribute in return,” Cuccia says.

A Bold Vision for Healthcare and Beyond

Modulim has attracted over ten million dollars in grants and private investment. Their solution has been rolled out with multiple partners, including Fresenius dialysis clinics, University of Arizona, University of Southern California, and Kaiser Permanente, to study patient populations with a heightened risk of amputation.

And diabetic foot care is only the beginning. With a $2.5 million dollar contract from the Department of Defense, Modulim has partnered with Anthony Durkin in UCI’s biomedical engineering department to build a tool for digital assessment of burns using their technology. Durkin’s lab has already demonstrated the ability of machine learning to map the area and severity of burns using Modulim’s proprietary outputs.

Moreover, the startup can tackle much more than just healthcare. Its technology has been used by research collaborators to understand skincare products, characterize produce quality, and visualize inks in tattoos and old manuscripts. The technology can also be applied in augmented reality by rendering a person’s appearance under different lighting conditions, utilizing a deeper understanding of how light interacts with skin.

But these projects are awhile away. Cuccia jokes that maybe when he’s retired, he’ll be able to work on these broader applications. For now, Modulim is focused on bringing their newest handheld version of their system to market. Understanding that collaborating with major payers and providers is crucial for commercial success, Modulim’s strategy aligns with the healthcare shift toward value-based care models, which focus on reducing costs and improving patient outcomes.

“If there’s a way that technology can help even the playing field and get patients earlier and better access to care,” says Mazhar, “it’s an opportunity for us to contribute to improving our health system.”

Learn more at: https://modulim.com/.

Click here to read the full article on the UC Irvine Beall Applied Innovation website.

Authors Mark Fisher, MD and Steve Greenberg, MD announce the publication of the science advisory in the journal STROKE and discuss predictors of ARIA, the use of antithrombotic and thrombolytic medications in patients receiving anti-amyloid therapy, and suggested treatment approaches.

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Read more on the American Heart Association Daily website.

Click here to watch video on YouTube.

Lumitron Technologies, a company housed in the UC Irvine Research Park and co-founded by Professor Christopher Barty of the UC Irvine Department of Physics & Astronomy, is developing a novel X-ray and electron beam machine called HyperVIEW™ that aims to selectively image cancer in the body and eliminate it while minimizing damage to surrounding tissue.

“The machine has now generated electron beams that can be used to treat cancer anywhere in the human body and x-ray beams that follow the same path as the electrons that can image cancer at 100 times beyond the resolution of conventional clinical systems,” said Barty. “The holy grail is that ultimately you will have the ability to guide your cancer treatment in ways that nobody’s ever been able to do before.” HyperVIEW™ is a fourth-generation, laser-Compton X-ray technology Barty started developing when he was a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. HyperVIEW™ X-rays will “allow you to image soft tissues at potentially cellular levels, something that has only ever been done at billion-dollar synchrotron facilities,” Barty said, which means Lumitron’s technology could one day both track and treat cancer at the cellular level in the human body. The company plans to have FDA approval for initial, precision cancer imaging applications by late 2025 and moved HyperVIEW™ to pre-clinical cancer treatment studies late this summer. “With this technology, we may eliminate the need to ever remove a breast or prostate again,” said Barty.

Click here to read the 2024 UC Irvine Physical Sciences Dean’s Report.

Discovery enables manufacturing of ultrathin solar panels, advanced optoelectronics

Irvine, Calif., Oct. 31, 2024 — By creating a new way for light and matter to interact, researchers at the University of California, Irvine have enabled the manufacturing of ultrathin silicon solar cells that could help spread the energy-converting technology to a vast range of applications, including thermoelectric clothing and onboard vehicle and device charging.

The development, subject of a paper recently published as the cover story in the journal ACS Nano, hinges on the UC Irvine researchers’ conversion of pure silicon from an indirect to a direct bandgap semiconductor through the way it interacts with light.

The UC Irvine team, in collaboration with scientists from Russia’s Kazan Federal University and Tel Aviv University, explored an innovative approach by conditioning the light rather than changing the material itself. They confined photons on sub-3-nanometer asperities near the bulk semiconductor, granting light a novel property – expanded momentum – that opens new interaction pathways between light and matter. By “decorating” the silicon surface, the researchers said, they achieved a boost in light absorption by orders of magnitude, along with a significant increase in device performance.

“In direct bandgap semiconductor materials, electrons transition from the valence band to the conduction band. This process requires only a change in energy; it’s an efficient transfer,” noted lead author Dmitry Fishman, UC Irvine adjunct professor of chemistry. “In indirect bandgap materials, like silicon, an additional component – a phonon – is needed to provide the electron the momentum necessary for the transition to occur. Since the likelihood of a photon, phonon and electron interacting at the same place and time is low, silicon’s optical properties are inherently weak.”

He said that as an indirect bandgap semiconductor, silicon’s poor optical properties limit the development of solar energy conversion, and optoelectronics in general, which is a drawback considering that silicon is the second-most abundant element in Earth’s crust and the foundation on which the world’s computer and electronics industries were built.

“Photons carry energy but almost no momentum, but if we change this narrative explained in textbooks and somehow give photons momentum, we can excite electrons without needing additional particles,” said co-author Eric Potma, UC Irvine professor of chemistry. “This reduces the interaction to just two particles, a photon and an electron, similar to what occurs in direct bandgap semiconductors, and increases light absorption by a factor of 10,000, completely transforming light-matter interaction without changing the chemistry of the material itself.”

Co-author Ara Apkarian, UC Irvine Distinguished Professor emeritus of chemistry, said: “This phenomenon fundamentally changes how light interacts with matter. Traditionally, textbooks teach us about so-called vertical optical transitions, where a material absorbs light with the photon changing only the electron’s energy state. However, momentum-enhanced photons can change both the energy and momentum states of electrons, unlocking new transition pathways we hadn’t considered before. Figuratively speaking, we can ‘tilt the textbook,’ as these photons enable diagonal transitions. This dramatically impacts a material’s ability to absorb or emit light.”

According to the researchers, the development creates an opportunity to exploit recent advances in semiconductor fabrication techniques at the sub-1.5-nanometer scale, which has the potential to affect photo-sensing and light-energy conversion technologies.

“With the escalating effects of climate change, it’s more urgent than ever to shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Solar energy is key in this transition, yet the commercial solar cells we rely on are falling short,” Potma said. “Silicon’s poor ability to absorb light means that these cells require thick layers – almost 200 micrometers of pure crystalline material – to effectively capture sunlight. This not only drives up production costs but also limits efficiency due to increased charge carrier recombination. The thin-film solar cells that are one step closer to reality due to our research are widely seen as the solution to these challenges.”

Other co-authors on this study included Jovany Merham and Aleksey Noskov of UC Irvine; Kazan Federal University researchers Elina Battalova and Sergey Kharintsev; and Tel Aviv University investigators Liat Katrivas and Alexander Kotlyar. The project received financial support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

About UC Irvine’s Brilliant Future campaign: Publicly launched on Oct. 4, 2019, the Brilliant Future campaign aims to raise awareness and support for the university. By engaging 75,000 alumni and garnering $2 billion in philanthropic investment, UC Irvine seeks to reach new heights of excellence in student success, health and wellness, research and more. The School of Physical Sciences plays a vital role in the success of the campaign. Learn more by visiting https://brilliantfuture.uci.edu/uci-school-of-physical-sciences.

About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UC Irvine is a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities and is ranked among the nation’s top 10 public universities by U.S. News & World Report. The campus has produced five Nobel laureates and is known for its academic achievement, premier research, innovation and anteater mascot. Led by Chancellor Howard Gillman, UC Irvine has more than 36,000 students and offers 224 degree programs. It’s located in one of the world’s safest and most economically vibrant communities and is Orange County’s second-largest employer, contributing $7 billion annually to the local economy and $8 billion statewide. For more on UC Irvine, visit www.uci.edu.

Media access: Radio programs/stations may, for a fee, use an on-campus studio with a Comrex IP audio codec to interview UC Irvine faculty and experts, subject to availability and university approval. For more UC Irvine news, visit news.uci.edu. Additional resources for journalists may be found at https://news.uci.edu/media-resources.

Click here to read full article on UC Irvine News.