Health care practitioners in West Virginia aren’t just healing people—they’re finding ways to heal people better.
With three medical schools, thousands of practicing doctors, and a growing entrepreneurial culture and support system, West Virginia is well-positioned to create medical technology innovations that will improve health care for people across the state and around the world. These two enterprising doctors say the Mountain State is a great place for innovation—and their operations prove it.
From doctors’ imaginations to real solutions
All day every day in West Virginia and around the world, doctors see people who have medical problems. Occasionally, they think of better ways to solve those problems. If they’re in a big city with lots of engineers and entrepreneurs, it might be easy for them to get help turning their ideas into technologies that can help people everywhere. Here, it’s a little harder.
“That’s really what we solve,” says Dr. Tom McClellan, CEO of Morgantown-based Intermed Labs. “We have this core team of very motivated entrepreneurs who want to make a dent in the universe. You bring us an idea, and we do everything from soup to nuts.”
Intermed Labs—IL—is what’s known as a start-up studio. More hands-on than a venture capital group or business incubator, a start-up studio reviews huge numbers of ideas for new businesses, whittles the list down to only the very likeliest, then provides funding, space, mentorship, and research and testing to develop those ideas in collaboration with the originators, with the aim of getting them to market. IL was launched in 2020 and now has sites at four health care institutions—CAMC, Marshall University, Mon Health, and the Orthopaedic Institute of Ohio—as well as some quick successes under its belt, with a pipeline of more to come. Each innovation takes a different pathway, and McClellan enthuses about every single one of them.
Moodr, for example, provides a new approach to the problem of perinatal and post-partum depression. “It can be hard in today’s health care environment to get hold of someone when you need to talk,” McClellan says. “But with the Moodr platform and a Fitbit, we can monitor how you sleep, and we can send you a 10-question survey every few days and track how you’re feeling over time.” When a patient’s trend lines start going the wrong direction, that cues a member of the doctor’s staff to reach out in a more timely and proactive way than would be possible without Moodr. The concept came from a psychiatrist in southern West Virginia, McClellan says. “I said, ‘That’s a great idea!’ And we built it.” About 400 Mon Health patients are currently participating in a trial of the platform. “I think it’s going exceedingly well,” he says. “We’re basically setting the gold standard for maternal mental health.”
An example of a technology quickly developed and sold is an idea Mon Health urologist Dr. Jaschar Shakuri-Rad had for improving the placement of a stimulator to reduce urinary or fecal incontinence. “Dr. Rad and our engineering team built a guidance system that is revolutionary in this field,” McClellan says. That technology was acquired in 2023 by a publicly traded company. “In 20 months, we went from a sketch on a piece of paper to acquisition by a major company. We did that here in Morgantown.”
Prominent among IL’s innovations is McClellan’s own Fingy3D, which can 3D print an affordable prosthetic finger based on a photo submitted online—reducing the cost of a replacement digit from thousands of dollars and multiple visits for fittings to as low as $300 with no transportation involved. Fingy3D won the American Society of Plastic Surgeons’ innovation competition in 2022, and it finished in the top five in the MedTech Innovator Awards 2023 among 1,200 entries from around the world—a competition in which the winner was a device from top engineering school Caltech.
Other technologies in the works at IL include a non-operative stabilizer for rib fractures, a better eye shield for use following surgeries, and others, with more still to come—IL hears about five ideas a week.
“We’re taking physician ideas literally from inside the hospital on a napkin all the way to exit or clinical trial or winning national competitions and impacting real people’s lives,” McClellan says. “In the next couple of months, hundreds of urologists will be trained on our guidance system. Probably 1,000 women will be on Moodr. And we hope this year we will have hundreds of amputees across the country with fingers made right here in Morgantown.” McClellan attributes IL’s success to a skilled core team that is driven to improve health care, disciplined in its approach, and exceedingly compatible. “I think that the approach of Intermed Labs is highly unique,” he says—one that’s harnessing the potential for north central West Virginia to become a medical innovation hub.
intermedlabs.com, moodrhealth.com, fingy3d.com
Brain surgery without the surgery
Some of the hardest-to-treat medical problems and scariest diagnoses relate to the brain. But neuroscientist Dr. Ali Rezai and the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute he heads up at West Virginia University are demonstrating approaches that not only show promise—they’re fast and effective and, in some cases, non-invasive and painless.
Rezai already had a world-class reputation when he took on leadership of the WVU RNI in 2017. He was a recognized leader in novel treatments using brain implants. He had authored more than 200 scientific publications, led a national neuroscience organization, and earned more than 50 patents for medical devices and technologies, five of them the foundations of start-up companies. He joined RNI because he liked its big vision for advancing neurological care and felt it would be more nimble than larger institutions—and he and his team are making the most of it. The steady stream of RNI advancements announced by WVU Medicine sounds like the health care of the future—a more hopeful and healthful future. Several were detailed in a January 2024 episode of the CBS TV news magazine 60 Minutes.
In 2019, WVU Medicine announced that Rezai and his team at RNI were among the first to use focused ultrasound—a form of the same non-invasive technology used to check a baby’s development during pregnancy—to treat essential tremor disorder, a neurological condition that causes a rhythmic shaking of the hands or other body parts. It looks a lot like Parkinson’s disease, and it worsens progressively. A short video that accompanied the announcement showed a patient who lived with tremors so persistent and uncontrollable that it was impossible for him to write legibly. After a two-hour, non-invasive treatment with focused ultrasound, during which the patient was awake and pain-free, his longtime tremor was gone.
That success encouraged Rezai to try using focused ultrasound to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. The brain scan of a patient diagnosed with Alzheimer’s shows the presence of beta-amyloid, a gummy protein that clumps together as a plaque that has been associated with cognitive decline. The Food and Drug Administration has approved two drugs that have the potential to remove beta-amyloid. But the blood–brain barrier that protects the brain from toxins also blocks most of the medication—and meanwhile, the disease is advancing. Rezai’s approach uses focused ultrasound to temporarily open the blood–brain barrier near the plaques, allowing the medication through. Six monthly sessions—again, non-invasive, awake, and painless—have shown visibly remarkable reductions in beta-amyloid in brain scans, according to RNI results published in the New England Journal of Medicine in January 2024. New research, Rezai says, looks beyond removing plaques to the possibility of restoring lost brain function by targeting ultrasound energy into the brain’s memory and attention centers. “We have completed three participants so far and have shown that the procedure is safe,” he explains, “and need more research to see if we can improve memory and cognition and restore brain function.”
While conditions like essential tremor and Alzheimer’s impose a gradual decline in the independence of tens of thousands of West Virginians, it’s hard to quantify the corrosive effect of addiction on individuals, families, and communities across the state. But research underway at the WVU RNI holds out hope.
Rezai and his team are testing deep brain stimulation, or DBS, for the treatment of patients who are severely affected by substance abuse disorder—those who have been unhelped by detoxification programs, medication-assisted treatment, counseling, or any other method—in a first-in-the-U.S. clinical trial begun in 2019. DBS is routinely used to treat Parkinson’s disease by implanting a stimulator in the movement center of the brain. To treat addiction, the RNI team implants it in the reward center of the brain, where it acts like a pacemaker, using electrical stimulation to reduce drug cravings. Of the four participants in the initial trial, one dropped out and one had a relapse, while two have found long-term relief from cravings that nothing else was able to control and have gotten their lives back on track.
But now the RNI is moving addiction treatment research beyond DBS, which involves surgery and an implant, to noninvasive focused ultrasound. In 2021, the team launched a safety and feasibility study in the use of focused ultrasound to treat addiction. Following positive results—including reported significant reductions in cravings among trial participants—the lab is starting a National Institute on Drug Abuse–sponsored followup study in 2024: a larger, randomized, placebo-controlled trial in 30 participants looking at the effect of focused ultrasound on drug cravings and use.
The road from clinical trials to routine treatments is a long and careful one, as it should be. Asked when these treatments might be available to West Virginians, Rezai cautions that these are early studies in a defined path toward ultimately gaining FDA approval. Still, these early successes feel like hope for the future where there was little hope before. wvumedicine.org
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