A UCF startup creates a lung simulator. Now, SegAna Phantom Technologies seeks investors.
It wasn’t long after retiring to Orlando three years ago that Rodney Bosley got restless and began searching for another entrepreneurial challenge.
The concept for a lung simulator — which can help oncologists deliver radiation more precisely to tumors in the lungs — proved irresistible to a man who has built companies from the ground up into multi-milliondollar businesses.
Soon after, he and the founding researchers — Dr. Olusegun Ilegbusi and Jihua Gou at the University of Central Florida, and Dr. Anand Santhanam at UCLA — incorporated SegAna Phantom Technologies, with the tagline “Lung Phantoms for Enhancing Targeted Therapy.”
“Our hope is that patients will start benefiting from this in 2018,” said Bosley, CEO and sole employee of SegAna. That’s assuming that he can get some interest from local investors.
“I’m hoping and I’m working hard to keep it here,” he said.
Aside from Santhanam in Los Angeles, everyone is local and all parts of the lung simulator are built here in Orlando, where SegAna has set up shop at the UCF Business Incubation Program at Central Florida Research Park in east Orange County.
Alpha Photo, another startup at the UCF incubator, has been building the simulator’s prototypes.
“But where does the money come from?” said Bosley. He grew his last company, ACELL, from a startup to a $75 million operation with 380 employees in his former home state of Maryland.
“But then again, I had investors to support it,” he said.
So far, SegAna has raised $300,000 from local investors and received a matching grant from The Florida Institute for the Commercialization of Public Research.
However, the company still
needs $2.6 million to get its product to market.
Bosley said local entrepreneurs have advised him to ask for rounds of $600,000 instead of a lump sum to increase his odds of finding an investor here.
Local investors, he said, find SegAna’s product exciting but they’re waiting for someone else to step up and make the first move.
“With investors a lot of times it’s what they know,” such as the defense-simulation industry here, Bosley said; a medical-device company, not so much.
SegAna’s simulator allows for recreation of a cancer patient’s lung through 3-D printing technology, then simulates the patient’s breathing patterns, hence creating a simulated, breathing lung of that particular patient to help oncologists fine-tune their radiation treatment plan before getting the patient on the table.
Dr. Thomas Dilling, director for Thoracic Oncology at the Department of Radiation Oncology at Moffitt Cancer Center, who’s not involved in SegAna, said the concept for the company’s product is novel and “an interesting solution to a given problem.”
Finding methods that would improve the precision of radiation treatment for lung cancer is an active field of research.
The human lung has varying density and function throughout.
Researchers think that if radiation treatment is planned so that the beams go through the less functional parts of the lung, patients would feel fewer side effects.
Several groups, including Moffitt’s Dilling and researchers at SegAna, have published papers on mathematical models for this purpose, but none are incorporated into clinical practice.
Dilling, who hasn’t seen SegAna’s product, said that although the company’s lung simulator is unique, there are still questions of practicality. In short, how feasible is it for radiation oncologist to incorporate the model — including the 3-D printing part — into practice, he asked. “I’d be interested to see it,” he said. In order to answer questions like Dilling’s, Bosley needs funds to push this young startup forward. He recently finalized the lung phantom’s first prototype, which he will take to partners at UCLA; next, he hopes to start printing lungs from actual patients’ CT scans and let oncologists test the simulator.
The patent-pending technology, owned by UCF and UCLA and is licensed to SegAna, will cost in the $8,000 range, Bosley said. It can be used as a teaching tool, or for planning patients’ radiation treatment.
A few oncologists at UCLA have also expressed interest in the product to calibrate their machines, because unlike the existing solid simulators, SegAna’s is elastic and mimics a lung’s structure — and it can help with better calibration and testing of imaging equipment.
“So we may actually have the ability to sell this sooner than we expected,” Bosley said.
Bosley, who has a research trip planned to UCLA in the summer, made a presentation last week to Florida Angel Nexus and will find out next week if there’s an interested investor.
“But I can tell you, if I go to UCLA, we’re going to get the money,” he said, snapping his fingers. “But they’re going to want to pull the company out there.”