Photoplethysmography and what my smart watch taught me about commercializing breakthroughs in medicine

My run this morning was a sweatfest here in the swampy DC summer. My smart watch didn’t skip a beat (pun intended) and chided me for my above-average heart rate and slower-than-average recovery time. Fall can’t come soon enough. 

I take that insight for granted today, but it wouldn’t be possible without the commercialization of lab-driven research dating back to the 1930s. Today, photoplethysmography is behind tiny green LEDs that flash hundreds of times per second to calculate heart rate. And it’s on millions of wrists around the world. 

But brilliant science has a tendency to get stuck. A discovery works in the lab, a paper gets published, a patent gets filed…and then nothing. The technology never reaches a patient. The gap between promising result and usable product is where most breakthroughs quietly die.

Since 2015, FedTech has partnered with startups that do something specific and hard: we take a technology sitting inside a federal lab, research center, or university, and we build a company around it. We recruit the founders, pressure-test the market, connect the science to mentors and capital, and help the venture stand on its own. Deep tech is what we're built for.

Nowhere is that harder, or more worth doing, than in the technologies that keep critically ill patients alive.

Consider Biomembretics. Artificial lungs (ECMO machines) keep critically ill patients alive when their own lungs can’t do the job. But they carry a dangerous flaw: blood tends to clot as it moves through the machine, forcing doctors into a constant, risky balance between clotting and bleeding. Biomembretics, built on technology from Draper Laboratory, designed a microfluidic membrane that mimics the way blood actually flows through the tiny vessels of a human lung, reducing the clotting that makes today’s technology precarious. It’s the kind of high-stakes, inside-the-body engineering that decides whether a patient makes it.

Or take InflammaSense. Sepsis, the body’s catastrophic overreaction to infection, kills hundreds of thousands of Americans a year, and every hour of delayed detection costs lives. Out of UC San Diego, InflammaSense built a wearable sensor that reads the body’s own nerve signals to flag sepsis risk earlier than existing methods. Since coming through our BARDA DRIVe health-security studio, it has raised venture and federal funding and moved into hospital intensive-care units. A wearable that buys clinicians time is the kind of leap that only happens when good science finds a path to market.

I’m proud of the work we do to close the distance between pure research and a product a clinician can reach for. It’s where good science most often stalls, and it’s a national priority to get it moving. Turning that science into real human impact is what drives us.

So next time I tap “Start Run” and do my best to stay below zone 4, I’ll think about the deep tech commercialization that made it possible.