Notre Dame startup VisiLocate aims to revolutionize breast cancer care
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Three University of Notre Dame students are reimagining the way breast cancer patients receive treatment.
Sunghoon Rho, 31, Ciara Dillon, 22, and Nicholas Ross, 35, co-founders of South Bend-based VisiLocate, a company seeking to help surgeons find breast cancer tumors using a miniature localization light device, clinched the grand prize at the McCloskey New Venture Competition held in April.
The team received a total of $127,000 in cash and in-kind prizes for best presentation, best graduate pitch deck, best graduate venture, startup showcase runner-up and best female-led venture. Rho, Dillon and Ross will also attend Startup Camp offered by Plug and Play.
Rho, a South Korean bioengineering fifth year student in the O’Sullivan Research Group at Notre Dame, developed the technology with guidance from Professor Thomas O’Sullivan.
Dillon, originally from Dublin, Ireland, recently graduated from the university’s ESTEEM program but plans to continue working with the VisiLocate team and is responsible for coming up with the company name.
“It really speaks for itself, kind of saying that it’s helping locate using visual guidance,” she said. “It’s like a guiding light to help surgeons remove tumors from breast tissue, and I really like the icon of a lighthouse because it brings hope and positivity to the medical device space and anyone who’s suffering through breast cancer.”
Ross, a fourth year bioengineering PhD student, is in the O’Sullivan Research Group along with Rho. O’Sullivan started cancer care research after his wife’s breast cancer diagnosis, Ross said.
Dillon noted that there is a need for a device that would improve on the current standard of care for breast cancer patients. Looking to apply what she was learning in her STEM entrepreneurship classes, Dillon approached O’Sullivan and Rho to talk about her interest in putting a team together to enter the McCloskey competition.
“I was really interested in what Dr. Sullivan’s lab was doing—Sunghoon’s device in particular. I wanted to see if it was commercially viable,” Dillon said. “I was able to leverage my background in the ESTEEM program to help develop the commercial plan with them. We play to each other’s strengths and weaknesses.”
Ross, who also has a background in sales, marketing and recruiting, leveraged his public speaking skills in giving presentations during the competition, fulfilling his dream of being a part of a commercialization process.
“I work very closely with Sunghoon; he’s the technology developer,” Ross said. “This was an opportunity for me to get into the process and go through this commercialization and see how it works from the ground up.”
As they advanced through competition stages, Dillon, Rho and Ross continued to hope for the best, but Ross’ optimism faded as he listened to other pitches and the revenue levels other founders had already achieved.
“When we started seeing the pitches in the final presentation, we saw that these people were generating a ton of revenue already, they had thousands of users on their apps already, so I was like, ‘Okay, at least we’ll win something,'” Ross continued. “We won our first prize and it was great, then they called our name again and it was very surreal, and it still doesn’t feel real.”
Dillon speaks about the device’s de-risking stage, Rho speaks about new features he wants to add to the device and Ross speaks about the road to getting FDA clearance for VisiLocate.
Ross added that the validation from winning the grand prize and other prizes also solidified the team’s conviction in the solution. The team has also received offers from several parties interested in helping and investing in the company.
“So many people have been touched by cancer and not in the right way. You hear their stories, listen to the emotional effect it’s had on their life and know that you’re doing something positive to help these people,” he added. “My wife would probably have breast cancer based on genetics, so knowing that I can help in that space has been the most rewarding part.”
The founders’ diversity is one of the factors Dillon believes set them apart from the competition. The team was able to weave their different educational, professional and cultural backgrounds into a beautiful synergy, Dillon added.
Rho said he appreciates all the help he received from his advisors, O’Sullivan and Patrick Fay, who he says is one of the best wireless power and optical researchers in the world.
The miniature nature of the device, generating enough power to turn on the device, navigating cultural differences and time constraints, and juggling school while working on the company are some challenges the team experienced since they joined forces last October.
“We all had things that we needed to get done throughout the semester that were challenging,” Ross said. “South Korean culture is very different from what I’m used to. It took a lot of patience on everyone’s part to be able to work through everything.”
The founders were able to work through and leverage their differences instead of seeing it as an obstacle, Dillon added.
As part of the competition, students assembled an advisory board initially consisting of O’Sullivan and Roy Stillwell, CEO of South Bend-based NearWave. The McCloskey team also connected VisiLocate with other mentors in the medical device space, including Dr. Alice Police, a breast surgeon with over 25 years of surgical experience.
The team is still deciding what to do with the prize money and are exploring the most judicious use for the funds.
“This money is definitely very large but in the medical device world, it’s not enough to bring our product to the clinical stage. We’re gonna have to fundraise in order to move it forward the way that we want and need to,” Dillon noted. “Right now we’re doing surgical simulations with different surgeons to gauge the device’s utility in the clinical space.”
For future versions, Rho, who recently published a paper in Photodiagnosis and Photodynamic Therapy, is already working on how to include either a scanning, monitoring or even therapeutic effect to the device. And instead of just finding cancer cells, a future version could possibly kill them, Ross said.
The invention currently uses an on-the-market wireless power transmitter that has not been cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The team is working on building their own transmitter and hope to get FDA approval through the 510(k) pathway once it’s ready.
Throughout the whole process, one thing that constantly stood out for Rho was the importance of people in any team or company.
“The company name is not important, the product is also not the most important,” Rho said. “Working with Professor O’Sullivan, Dr. Alice Police, Roy Stillwell, Ciara Dillon and Nicholas Ross, the six of us together, we can do another product, improve on it and make it again.”
For fellow student entrepreneurs, Ross encouraged them to keep going despite failure or setback. Highlighting that he had failed severally but got lucky with his co-founders in VisiLocate.
“Don’t be afraid to fail, most startups don’t succeed, so if you fail, it doesn’t mean that you’re a failure, it just means it wasn’t the right time for your business idea,” Ross said. “I’ve failed plenty of times, but then I got lucky with these two, so keep on plugging away.”