Ten years ago, two pediatric heart specialists approached USC biomedical engineer Gerald Loeb with an idea for a new pacemaker designed for babies, whose hearts are too small for conventional models.
The tiny device wouldn't require open-chest surgery, sit inside the heart or have wire leads, which often break. Inserted under the breastbone through a small tube, the miniature pacemaker - a little bigger than a vitamin E capsule - would fit securely between the heart and its surrounding pericardial membrane.
Loeb is no stranger to medical innovation. A biomedical engineering professor at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Loeb developed and patented an artificial fingertip with a complete sense of touch that was licensed to a successful spin-off company from his USC lab. He specializes in electronic devices that connect with the nervous system.
"My career consists of people coming in with crazy ideas and deciding which ones are practical enough to give a shot," Loeb says.
The pericardial micro pacemaker is getting its shot. He and Yaniv Bar-Cohen, a pediatric heart specialist at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and Children's Hospital Los Angeles, developed, patented and successfully demonstrated a working model. Bar-Cohen is in talks with pacemaker companies that can bring their device to market. They envision it being used in babies, children and adults.
From pill-sized pacemakers to stem cell therapies and new cancer treatments, USC researchers are collaborating to advance medical innovations, address complex health challenges and improve lives. Trojan researchers across the sciences are seeking to cure blindness, develop new testing options for cancers such as ovarian and breast cancers, and delay the onset of arthritis. They are also finding new ways to detect and slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease.
"At USC, we don't just imagine the future of medicine; we engineer it, we patent it, we launch it," says Ishwar K. Puri, USC's senior vice president of research and innovation. "Our researchers are redefining what's possible. This is what it means to innovate like a Trojan."
The USC Stevens Center for Innovation plays a pivotal role in many of these efforts, managing the intellectual property generated from more than $1.2 billion in annual research funding across medicine, engineering and the sciences - a scale that reflects USC's growing influence in shaping the future of health technologies.
"We're seeing more faculty startups launch with strong science and real commercial potential," says Erin Overstreet, executive director at the Stevens Center. "We want to make sure we're helping them build the right foundation - from patents to partnerships."
