Join the WashU Office of Technology Management (OTM) for a special Office Hours event featuring WashU IP startup and Cortex Innovation District neighbor, Varro Life Sciences.
OTM Office Hours: A Founders’ Journey series is where academic startup founders share their business journeys and participants receive tangible learnings they can immediately apply to their own entrepreneurial pursuits.
Varro Life Sciences, a WashU IP startup, protects global health through innovative diagnostic and environmental surveillance technologies that are accessible, ethical, and transformative. Varro’s micro-immunoelectrode based biosensor technology platform identifies viral, bacterial, and fungal pathogens in real time.
This event will include a panel discussion, moderated by OTM’s Director of New Ventures, Karen Gheesling Mullis, PhD, and featuring Varro Life Sciences founders:
John Cirrito, PhD
Dr. Cirrito received his B.S at Boston College (Psychology) and Ph.D. at Washington University in St. Louis (Neuroscience) where he has been a faculty member since 2007. His work focuses on protein kinetics in neurodegenerative diseases, primarily Alzheimer’s disease. To that end, he has developed several novel techniques to measure protein levels longitudinally and in real-time in the mouse brain. He was the first to publish using in vivo microdialysis to measure amyloid-beta, the protein that initiates Alzheimer’s, every 60 minutes in the brain interstitial fluid. His group found that brain activity drives the formation and eventual aggregation of amyloid-beta as plaques in the disease. Dr. Cirrito’s group also pioneered the development of the micro-immunoelectrode (MIE) that uses an antibody-based biosensor to detect proteins every 60 seconds to measure rapid protein kinetics in vivo. It is the MIE technology that spurred the innovation of a SARS-CoV-2 biosensor used in a breath test and indoor air quality monitor that is currently being developed by Varro Life Sciences. Dr. Cirrito is a scientific co-founder of Varro.
Tom Cirrito, PhD
Dr. Tom Cirrito is a serial entrepreneur, inventor, and founder of multiple companies in the life sciences. He is currently a co-founder, CEO and Chairman of Varro Life Sciences, a St. Louis biotech company developing rapid and sensitive biosensors that can detect pathogens in aerosols. He is one of few biotechnology entrepreneurs in the industry who have built companies from an early stage through an IPO, and led a drug development program from concept through FDA approval (Elzonris). Dr. Cirrito is also Founder and Executive Chairman of Filament BioSolutions, and Managing Partner of Astonishing Labs, a venture creation fund focused on commercializing the world’s leading science. Previously, he founded and was CEO of Biotagenics, Inc. and Immunovent, Inc., and helped to found AGelity BioMechanics. With numerous patent applications in his name, his career began in biotechnology as Vice President of Research and Development and Director of Business Development at Stemline Therapeutics (NASDAQ: STML). Dr. Cirrito has also taught BioEntrepreneurship at NYU.
Dr. Cirrito holds a B.A. in Biological Sciences and a Ph.D. in Immunology from Washington University in St. Louis, with published works and patents in a variety of scientific fields.
Carla Yuede, PhD
Carla Yuede, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Psychiatry Department at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, MO with joint appointments in Neurology and Neuroscience. Dr. Yuede is the director of the Animal Behavior Core at Washington University, a core facility conducting functional assessments in a wide range of pre-clinical rodent models. Her primary research focuses on the mechanisms underlying biological/physiological changes occurring in the brain leading to impairments or improvements in memory function. These interests led Dr. Yuede to join the laboratory of Dr. John Cirrito to develop micro-immunoelectrodes (MIEs) to study rapid kinetics of beta amyloid and other peptides involved in Alzheimer’s disease. With the Cirrito lab, the MIE technology has been optimized and expanded to detect several different proteins and peptides, including SARS-CoV-2. Dr. Yuede received a B.S. in Psychology and Biomedical Sciences from Missouri State, and Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of Missouri- St. Louis and postdoctoral studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Yuede has been on the faculty of Washington University School of Medicine since 2012 and is a scientific co-founder of Varro Life Sciences.
Registration is required.
Questions?
Please contact Leslie Roettger at leslie.roettger@wustl.edu