It almost sounds like the start of an old joke: A Russian, a Nebraskan and an MIT scientist are sitting at a table…
But this is no joke. The Russian saw a problem and thought of a way to fix it. The Nebraskan knew how to make the vision a reality, and the MIT scientist brought the two together in a cross-pollination of disciplines and university campuses.
Anna Brynskikh Boyum left Moscow in 2006 to pursue her pharmacology doctorate at UNMC. At the same time, Tom Frederick finished his senior year at Mt. Michael High School in Elkhorn, Neb.
And Shane Farritor, Ph.D., a MIT-trained mechanical engineer at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, was working on small robots that might make safer wide-ranging things like surgery or railroads.
As a grad student in UNMC’s Center for Drug Delivery and Nanomedicine, Boyum spent a lot of time in front of a cryostat machine that can shave frozen tissue samples into layers so thin it would take a stack of them to equal the average human hair.
Such thin slices can reveal a multitude of things, such as cancerous cells from a liver biopsy.
But the delicate slices tend to curl, wrinkle or tear before a lab technician can get the sample onto a slide for microscopic analysis.
Couple this with other challenges – static electricity and transfer of technician’s body heat to the sample.
For help she turned to Dr. Farritor at the 2012 Innovation Awards – hosted by UNeMed Corporation, the technology transfer office at UNMC. He introduced the young students to each other and a year later, Boyum and Frederick, a doctoral candidate in mechanical and material engineering at UNL, were among the presenters for the first ever UNMC Startup Company Demonstration Day.
There, they officially launched their first product, Versatool – an ergonomically-designed handle with an integrated knife and interchangeable tips using a slick, magnetic coupling system. The design also conducts less heat and less static electricity.
The elegant design perhaps inspired the name of the startup company Boyum and Frederick formed together, Elegant Instruments.