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- Question: What drew you to combine your interest with engineering and medicine?
- Padala: I got my mechanical engineering degree in India, and did a 1 year internship at the hypersonic propulsion lab at the Indian defense laboratories, where I got my first introduction to putting theory into practice . When I came to Georgia Tech to get my PhD, I began focusing on heart valves and fluid mechanics, plainly the study of blood flow through the heart. After finishing my PhD, I started my independent lab in the division of cardiothoracic surgery at Emory, where our focus was on applied translational research – i.e., apply engineering concepts to viable medical solutions. The cardiothoracic surgery division here has a unique mix of clinical practice and research enterprise, and this environment provided me the opportunity to identify the right medical problems, and develop solutions that a clinician would want to use to treat their patients.
- Question: How do you balance the goal between research and commercialization?
- Padala: For me, research and commercialization are not really two different things. From its start, my lab had developed parallel paths: (a) a research path where we study a disease and develop the necessary models to investigate the disease mechanisms; and (b) a solution path where we conceive solutions that might address the disease and test them in the models we created to study the disease. I think this path has worked so far, since we now have a lot of our attending cardiac surgeons getting involved in these projects and spending their time off in the lab. One thing we learnt early was that good research leads to good commercialization, because the human body is quite unforgiving of a bad idea, even if its back by significant investment; and a good proven idea often attracts the investment it needs to get to the market, of course if the market is big enough.
- Question: In general, how does the Office of Technology Transfer help move discoveries to the marketplace?
- Padala: OTT has been quite helpful in two main areas. One of them is the expertise regarding commercialization and patent protection provided by the licensing team and medical device attorney. They work with me regularly to understand the IP landscape and what facets of the technology we can actually patent. For example, I can send them a rough draft of the different ideas I have and they help me distinguish our design from what has been published elsewhere. That help is significantly important because as a researcher and inventor alone, I do not have the time or a complete understanding of patent law to create a well-written patent. The second main area is business development. The office is quite proactive in finding seed or development funding opportunities to apply to, which can go toward developing and testing a prototype which generates critical proof of concept data for the technology and allows for further investment.