During the 3rd Annual Celebration of Innovation 2007 held on September 24, 2007 at the University of Pittsburgh's Peterson Event Center, Michael R. Pinsky, MD, received a “Pitt Innovator Award 2007” for his work co-founding iNTELOMED, a cardiovascular information processing company whose prototype can assess cardiovascular sufficiency using completely non-invasive techniques. Juan Carlos Puyana, MD, jointly from the Departments of Critical Care Medicine and Surgery, shared in this award but was not present for the ceremony. Also, being honored at this ceremony and from our department but not present was Mitchell Fink, MD, past Chairman of the Department of Critical Care Medicine, who received the award for his co-founding Rational Therapeutics, a company that targets drug therapy at key sites in inflammation and repair metabolic pathways. Seventy-two University of Pittsburgh faculty in all were honored at this ceremony run by the University Chancellor Mark Nordenberg, Provost James Maher and Vice-Chancellor for Health Sciences and Dean of the School of Medicine, Arthur Levine. Awardees represented all parts of the University from the Schools of Education, Engineering, Arts and Science and the medical specialties. Chancellor Nordenberg thanked the awardees for their “valuable contributions toward fostering a growing culture of commercial innovation development and academic entrepreneurship on campus.” Awardees were those Pitt faculty who had their innovations licensed or optioned to industry or start-up companies in fiscal 2007. Dr. Pinsky’s contribution as iNTELOMED co-founder was to develop the generalized physiological approach based upon the “Functional hemodynamic monitoring” U.S. patent he developed for the University of Pittsburgh. “I feel honored to receive this award” Dr. Pinsky said, “because it reflects the success of several years of hard work by the iNTELOMED co-founders, Juan Carlos Puyana, MD, Jan Berkow and myself to see these very practical and powerful ideas come to fruition.” The iNTELOMED company with the support of the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse is presently developing a prototype unit that will assess a patient’s cardiovascular sufficiency using non-invasive sensors. “Assuming we can make its interface simple enough for routine applications,” says Dr. Pinsky, “the clinical utility of such a monitor across all of healthcare is profound.

Mark A. Nordenberg, Arthur S. Levine MD,
Michael R.Pinsky MD, and James V. Maher