Tag: Sparo Labs

Students in the CELect Entrepreneurship Course held at the T-REx startup accelerator are sharing their team projects this semester on the Olin Blog. This report is from the team working at Sparo Labs, a company founded by Wash U Class of 2013 grads.

Asthma is a devastating public health issue. Despite a staggering number of asthma patients – estimated at 300 million worldwide and 1 million new cases diagnosed in US every year – asthma (and other related respiratory illnesses) is still a tremendously misunderstood and mismanaged condition affecting quality of life and imposing significant, yet avoidable, economic burdens on the health care system. The healthcare system as a whole isn’t working for asthma patients – clinicians don’t have time to spend with patients to properly educate them, additionally they don’t have effective tools for properly managing patients and making well-informed decisions.

Current solutions for asthma patients to track their symptoms, even in developed Western nations, are inadequate for daily use. Spirometers found in doctor’s office are expensive, and require the services of a trained technician to calibrate them often. Peak flow meters have the advantage of being distributable to patients, but they are unwieldy, unreliable, and not sophisticated. Moreover, neither offers patients a meaningful way to engage with the status of their lung function or to better understand what and how different factors (medications and triggers) affect their asthma.

Without a system to actively track lung capacity changes, patients and doctors experience great difficulty understanding causes, symptoms, and successful remedies, which can vary greatly from individual to individual.

Sparo Labs: Taking flight with Wing

Sparo Labs are located at the T-Rex accelerator in downtown St. Louis. Watch video of Abby and Andrew demonstrating their mobile-enabled spirometer.

Abigail Cohen and Andrew Brimer, co-founders of Sparo Labs and WashU alumni, are introducing Wing. Wing is an innovative product that allows asthma patients to be pro-active in managing their asthma and not have to rely on their doctor as the single source of information.

Wing combines the strengths of clinical spirometers and peak flow meters, while also discarding their barriers to patient access. It is a simple, no-frills, pocket-sized sensor that connects to a visually appealing cloud-based management and education app on smartphones. This innovative technology allows asthma patients and caretakers (such as parents, nurses, and doctors) to accurately measure lung function at any given time. Asthma patients will have the power to always know “how their asthma is doing” and what preventive measures they can take before the onset of an asthma attack. Furthermore, chosen clinicians can easily access the data, improving dialogue with their patients.

With the product nearing the FDA submission and clearance process, Abigail and Andrew have set their sights on selecting the best channels to spread awareness and excitement in preparation for a beta-launch of Wing.

Where Team CELECT Adds Value

Abigail and Andrew provided the CELect team with in-house research and suggestions to familiarize themselves with the customers they were looking to garner the most support amongst and the different options to implementing a successful pre-launch campaign.

Specifically, the CELect team needs to understand the potential target customers’

1) Individual pain points i.e. parent’s frustration with inability to help their children,

2) Technological ability and comfort level, and

3) Appropriate channels to provide the necessary and applicable information.

The goal now is to find the appropriate channels that will garner the most support (as part of a pre-launch campaign) to demonstrate credible demand and interest that Sparo Labs can use to leverage for further promotion post-FDA approval.

The CELect team looks forward to working closely with Abigail and Andrew over the next two months and is excited to take part in a project that will have real, significant, and long-lasting impact on the asthma community. More broadly, the team feels Wing can serve as an actionable example to help fix the information disconnect that limits chronic diseases patients from actively managing their lives.

CELect – Sparo Team
Kenneth Mao – MBA 2016
Srinivas Medepalli – PMBA 38
Kevin Smith – JD 2016
Christopher Weber – JD 2016

Images: WUSTL Photos

Andrew Brimer and Abigail Cohen, May graduates from the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis and co-founders of the med-tech startup Sparo Labs, have won the $150,000 CIMIT Student Technology Prize for Primary Care, bringing their total competition winnings to more than $275,000.

The first undergraduate team to win the prize in the contest’s 5-year history, the pair defeated graduate and post-doctoral teams from MIT, the University of California-Berkeley and Johns Hopkins.

“We are very proud to represent both Washington University and St. Louis in this national competition,” Brimer says. “Abby and I excited to have our business located in downtown St. Louis at T-REx and be part of the city’s thriving startup community. We still have close ties with the university and are very thankful for the support and encouragement we received and continue to receive there as we move forward.”

In addition to the seven other competitions that Sparo Labs has won, including an Arch Grant, the Olin Cup and the School of Engineering’s Discovery Competition, the CIMIT funds will enable Sparo Labs to continue building a solution that empowers patients to more effectively manage their asthma.

“It is an amazing accomplishment that Abby and Andrew have managed to fund their seed round entirely through competition winnings,” says Clifford Holekamp, senior lecturer in entrepreneurship at Olin Business School, director of the school’s entrepreneurship platform and co-teacher of the university’s Hatchery business incubator course, which helped the pair hone their idea.

“Abby and Andrew represent the very best of our student entrepreneurs,” he says. “Working as a team, they have combined creativity with discipline and determination. The results are showing us all what is possible.”

Sparo Labs is developing an award-winning, patent-pending spirometer system that can be produced for a fraction of the cost of current spirometers today, while seamlessly connecting with smartphones via mobile and web apps.

Cohen and Brimer hope that putting this powerful device in the hands of patients will revolutionize how respiratory diseases are managed—empowering patients to quantitatively track and proactively control their asthma, and equipping doctors with the power of objective and real-time data to better and more efficiently manage their patients.

“Abby and Andrew are truly exceptional people who developed a remarkable initial idea into full-fledged products, careers and a company,” says Kurt Thoroughman, PhD, associate professor of engineering and director of undergraduate studies at the School of Engineering & Applied Science.

“One very unique feature of Washington University is accessibility: we have world-class schools, centers, departments and faculty, all of which are committed to working across our academic community,” Thoroughman says. “Abby and Andrew were able to pioneer, nurture and develop their ideas independently, seeking just the proper help at the proper time from resources in School of Engineering and across the university. Abby and Andrew complemented their independence and insight with willingness, openness, and trust to seek and get what they needed to flourish, and we are thrilled that Washington University could provide the broad and deep environment for them to launch Sparo Labs.”

Brimer and Cohen say they owe much of their success to the nurturing entrepreneurial spirit of the university.

“The university is doing a great job promoting and encouraging entrepreneurship on all levels, from the ‘back of a napkin ideas’ that can be pitched at an IdeaBounce, to the Olin Cup or Discovery Competition that help foster more developed or mature projects into real companies with serious funding,” Brimer says.

“Washington University’s focus on entrepreneurship has allowed us and other students the ability to get valuable feedback and funding to help turn ideas into viable companies with large potential for impact,” Cohen says.

The pair has received mentorship from the Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, the Hatchery entrepreneurship course at Olin Business School taught by Holekamp and from Mario Castro, MD, director of the Asthma and Airway Translational Research Unit at the School of Medicine.

Watch video.

By Neil Schoenherr

About CIMIT

CIMIT is the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology. A fifteen-year-old non-profit consortium of Boston-area teaching hospitals and engineering schools, CIMIT brings innovators together to explore, develop and implement novel technological solutions for today’s most urgent healthcare problems. Participants in the consortium are Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston Medical Center, Boston University, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Children’s Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Newton-Wellesley Hospital, Northeastern University, Partners HealthCare and VA Boston Healthcare System.

For the first time ever, an all-undergrad team made it to the final round of the Olin Cup business plan competition and received one of three awards granted.

Sparo Labs, a medical device company that has developed a new spirometer to monitor lung function, was awarded $30,000. The team consists of four WUSTL undergraduate students.  The team is pictured above: Jon Koo (A&S), Abby Cohen (Engineering), Andrew Brimer (Engineering), and Chris Cassidy (Olin).

Each of the three teams also received a $5,000 cash prize, as they include current students or young alumni who worked on the ventures while they were students.

“The student grant means a lot to us because we are the first team of only undergraduate students to win it,” says Abigail Cohen, one of the Sparo Labs team members and a senior biomedical engineering major. “For us to be named one of the winners and also to get a $30,000 investment was a big milestone for us, and it means a lot to us.”

The ceremony was the culmination of a four-month competition among the contestants.

“We’re a hardworking team,” Cohen says. “Hard work pays off sometimes and it has paid off for us. We’ve got a good product, and people see that, and people also see that we’re really passionate about it and really excited about where it could go. We’re going to work our best and hardest to get it where it needs to be.”

Read about all the winners in Olin News.