The industry was on display Thursday with the ninth annual Celebration of Biotechnology, a trade show hosted by the BioFlorida trade association on the campus of RTI Biologics in Progress Corporate Park in Alachua.

Alachua County has 33 of the 193 biotech companies in the state, according to Florida BioDatabase. South Florida has more companies, while Alachua County has the most compact cluster in the state. Many are located in Progress Park, employing nearly 1,000 people, including tenants of UF’s Sid Martin Biotech Incubator and graduate companies throughout the park. The biggest company, RTI, has about 460 employees in the park and 700 worldwide.

David Day, director of technology licensing for UF, said the community is focusing on other types of tech because of the new Innovation Hub, but 60 percent of UF research funding continues to be from health sources such as the National Institutes of Health that lead to medical treatments, diagnostics or devices.

Read more from the Gainesville Sun here.

Check out Fracture’s video and vote today! Besides helping make the Fracture facility look and feel like an amazing workplace for the Fracture Team, Fracture co-founder Abhi Lokesh said the makeover will help the company get closer to the goal of being a cutting-edge, inspiring workspace that the Gainesville community can be proud of.

Initially set at 12 pages, the spread grew to 27 pages of articles and ads after a terrific response with exciting content from the community. Read Gainesville’s spotlight in US Airways Magazine here.

US Airways is the dominant carrier in the eastern United States, with 32 million flights and more than 52 million passengers worldwide. US Airways magazine is seen each month by more than 6 million of the world’s elite business and leisure travelers. The May issue of the magazine will reach more than 3 million of US Airways most frequent sophisticated business travelers, targeting high-tier business leaders and corporate decision makers.

For a chemical, chlorine dioxide (ClO2) has an intriguing history. It was discovered during the Napoleonic Wars, then forgotten and rediscovered for its potent effects as a bleach, oxidizer and disinfectant. It’s the gold standard of disinfection, but it is used rarely and only under special conditions.

According to Ian Knapp, CEO of ReliOx, it has become the “disinfectant of last resort” for a variety of reasons. In an antimicrobial capacity, it is 25 more times powerful than bleach, but it can only be generated when needed, can’t be transported and is typically mixed in a “horrific” process using other dangerous chemicals.

Currently, ClO2 is used in municipal water treatment and to bleach wood pulp for the paper industry. Since it must be produced on-site using hydrochloric acid and chlorine gas and is extremely difficult to transport, its use is limited to industrial scale operations.

Based on technology already common to the water treatment industry, Knapp says ReliOx has developed a way to bring the chemical from “last resort” to the first choice in disinfectants for janitorial and healthcare sanitation, water treatment and even fighting foodborne pathogens.

“This compound would be the chemical of choice for any cleaning interaction if it were readily available and easy to use,” Knapp said. “Big industry uses it, but small industry runs away from it. With the advent of MRSA, foodborne pathogens – like in cantaloupes – that are killing people, chlorine dioxide has become the chemical that people wish they could use to rid themselves of pathogens.”

Using research from the University of Florida, ReliOx has developed a solution for the production and transport of ClO2 that will allow it to be created safely for any cleaning interaction, from the kitchen to the water treatment facility.

“Our market is truly global, anywhere people go,” Knapp said. “Think about the inside of an airplane or a cruise ship. This product is far better than what is currently being used. It’s been tried, and what has failed is the delivery mechanism – that’s where we are better.”

The process uses special plastic resin beads – like those used to demineralize water in household water softeners – to safely convert sodium chlorite (an easily transportable precursor to chlorine dioxide) to the ClO2 wherever it is needed, and in any concentration.

ReliOx technology officer Phil Wagner compared the process to making coffee, exchanging the ReliOx beads for ground beans and a potent cleaning agent for coffee. The beads can be stored on the shelf or shipped via FedEx, solving the chemical’s storage and transportation challenges.

Knapp said their product offers consumers the flexibility that has never been offered before since it can be produced at any concentration and volume. With little variation, Knapp said the chemical could be produced to clean anything from chicken carcasses to the countertop.

“Nothing is resistant, and it kills microbes and viruses at very low concentrations that are not harmful to people,” Knapp said. “Once it has been used, it breaks down under normal light so it is no longer harmful at all. It does its job and disappears.”

As a disinfectant, ClO2 is superior in its microbial kill rate and in its safety to use in small concentrations. To kill microbes to an undetectable level, you would need only 58 parts per million for ClO2, compared to 30,000 per million for hydrogen peroxide.

The company is currently in the evaluation phase before registering the product with the Environmental Protection Agency and other regulatory bodies, but Knapp feels the company is prepared to move quickly once the product is approved.

“That was one thing we recognized from the beginning, looking at the technology,” he said. “We thought ‘This is too simple; we can go to market almost immediately.’ There are no hindrances to getting to market, and we don’t have to reinvent the wheel for anything.”

ReliOx was named to the Cade Prize Final Four on April 23, one of two Gainesville companies to make the cut. The Cade Prize winner will be announced May 11 at the Cade Prize Night gala. Look for more Cade profiles coming soon.

The new Mustang used Kinect sensors on the vehicle to look at pedestrians or objects surrounding the vehicle. It also featured two Windows 8 tablets on the dashboard. One tablet takes the place of your traditional gauges, and can be swiped across to be given a new look. A tablet mounted on the passenger side of the car can be used to send messages and surf the web, or to create messages that are displayed on the rear window of the car for other drivers.

352 Media designed the Mustang’s dashboard app, including three display options and a heads-up display that reflects onto the windshield. It also developed a Windows Phone app used to unlock the car, view the instrument panel or the Kinect-sensor view or send a voice message to the car.

Check out the car in a video from West Coast Customs.

- ReliOx Corporation and Ian Knapp of Gainesville for a simple and safe system to create the disinfectant chlorine dioxide from water and specially created plastic beads individually stored in rechargeable cartridges. The technology could be used in hospitals, food processing, restaurants and public transportation.

- Transdermal Insulin Patch being developed by Stephen Hsu of Prometheon Pharma in Gainesville delivers insulin or other large molecules through the skin, eliminating the need for needles and injections for diabetics and other patients.

- eCath developed by Phil Hipol and Stuart Hart at the University of South Florida is an electronic catheter stethoscope that allows doctors to hear inside the body using non-invasive electronic sensors attached to a catheter. It can be used for fetal heart rate monitoring, to monitor other sensitive heartbeat and respiration sounds and in hysterectomies.

- NanoDLSay invented from work by Qun Huo of Nano Discovery in Orlando measures interactions between gold nanoparticles and biomolecules to analyze disease markers, including cancer.

The finalists were chosen over three rounds by almost 30 judges, who included entrepreneurs, investors and technology commercialization specialists.

Keep an eye on the iG blog for more profiles on the Cade Prize companies. Click here for more information and to find tickets for the Cade Museum Prize Night gala.

Co-located in Ohio and an office in the Florida Innovation Hub, the Mind2Market team has become adept at working from a distance. Its product – a non-contact heart- and respiratory-rate monitor – will bring that expertise to hospital rooms and veterinary offices throughout the country – perhaps even to your living room.

Mind2Market’s device uses mini Doppler radar technology to provide constant monitoring of a patient’s heart and lungs, which can be beamed to central location so one person can monitor multiple patients without being in the room.

According to Mind2Market (M2M) CEO Tim Toppen, vital signs are taken once every four hours in a hospital ward, meaning patients spend more than 95 percent of their time unmonitored. M2M’s device, which can sit above a bed, would allow healthcare staff to set parameters to alert them in real-time if a patient’s condition is changing for the worse, reducing “failure to rescue” events.

Since it is non-contact, Toppen said using the device would help reduce the number of hospital-acquired infections, which cause nearly 100,000 deaths and cost up to $33 billion dollars each year.

The device would also have applications in the veterinary field, from household pets to elephants. If you have ever taken a dog to the vet, you know that it’s rare to get a normal heart rate reading. Since vets have to enter or change an animal’s environment, they alter the animal’s mood and vital signs. M2M’s device would allow a vet to take natural readings through glass or in an animal’s stall.

Though it is a young company, Mind2Market is exploring a number of markets for the product. The company is planning to start clinical trials at the University of Florida veterinary school this month, is working with a UF anaesthesiologist and has been contacted by equestrian professionals in Kentucky and Florida to test the product.

After the early trials, Toppen said the company will work to improve the range and function of the device to read other vital signs, including temperature, blood pressure and even pain through voice-modulation monitoring.

But Toppen thinks the device will have applications well beyond the clinic and plans to adapt the technology to fit in exercise equipment, to augment fitness video games for the living room and to help provide security screening in high-risk areas.

“If someone has something planned, their heart rate goes up,” Toppen said. “We see all sorts of applications from prisons to border crossings. Right now, we are focusing on a proof of concept to demonstrate it can work in the controlled environment of the clinical trials. We want to get this right and have the professional caregivers running the trials and writing the research papers to validate the technology.”

Beat the heat this year by attending early and meet some of our area’s most exciting biotech companies. For more information, contact Patti Breedlove at 386.462.0880 or pbreedlove@sidmartinbio.org, or visit www.sidmartinbio.org.

BioFlorida is the voice of Florida’s bioscience industry representing more than 3,000 companies and research organizations in the biotechnology, pharmaceutical and medical device fields employing 61,000 Floridians. BioFlorida’s member-driven initiatives provide a strong business climate for production of quality, life-improving technologies and promote economic benefits to the state.

According to Shadow Health CEO David Massias, students are currently asked to learn how to communicate with patients without access to actual patients, creating a gap between the text book and a real healthcare interaction.

Allowing students to interact with patients can pose a risk for healthcare providers, so medical and nursing schools simulate the experience with standardized roleplaying, either by a hired “patient” or classmate re-enactment of a medical condition.  While this may remove the risk of a real patient, Massias said it does not provide a consistent experience for students or an objective evaluation platform for faculty instructors.

To overcome those limitations, Shadow Health has created Tina Jones, a digital patient that allows nursing, medical and allied health students to recreate a clinical experience with a dynamic patient. The digital patient can simulate the presentation of any illness covered in the textbook and allows each student to consistently see an exact medical problem, whether it’s for one student or 1,000.

Tina is driven by licensed University of Florida technology that Massias calls the “conversation engine.” The engine allows the student to ask Tina questions about her health, to which she will respond in real-time. For instance, a student will have to ask Tina how she is feeling and why she came to the clinic to learn that she fell two weeks ago and hurt her foot.

The system allows professors to build lesson plans and patient interactions around nine week-long modules focused on different areas of the anatomy – fully covering a textbook. During the digital exam, students must ask the correct questions and use about a dozen medical instruments to interact with Tina during the assessment.

Shadow Health’s approach allows students to learn at their own pace, but requires them to use critical thinking to meet the objectives of the current module. Over a semester, students will cover the full health of a patient with modules on cardiology, respiratory, mental state/psych, musculoskeletal, ear nose and throat and more before coming up with a differential diagnosis in the final module.

The digital patient is able to help students learn the presentation of illness, but Massias said students are really learning valuable communication skills.

“We heard from employers that nursing, medical and allied health students graduate with incredible books smarts, but they need help communicating with patients,” he said. “They don’t have access to communication with live patients, so we have created risk-free, convenient environment where students can practice one-on-one communication skills.”

The system also benefits faculty and professors, with a course designed specifically for material that exists in every nursing and medical school across the country. Instead of creating new case studies and grading often-unreliable student interactions, faculty can use Shadow Health’s patient study with a built-in scoring mechanism.

After a student’s clinical examination of Tina, both the student and the faculty member receive immediate feedback, allowing students and professors to speed up the remediation process.

“All of this takes place out of the classroom, but the faculty automatically knows the areas that must be focused on in the classroom,” Massias said. “Faculty save time from creating case studies and evaluating student interactions, and students have access to physical exam and communication building opportunities they don’t currently have.”

The system has been beta-tested in four large accredited medical schools for the last five years, and Massias said the company will be launching its product across the country within the next 60 – 90 days. In the future, Shadow Health will build products with a family of patients that represent different gender, ethnicity, age and pathologies, covering the first two years of medical school and nursing school.

According to Massias, Shadow Health chose to focus on healthcare education because it had the most important application for society. If the company can change healthcare education, Massias believes the other applications will fall into place.

Massias, an entrepreneurial mentor for FloridaWorks’ TechQuest program, thinks Shadow Health’s one-on-one method can exponentially accelerate learning and incorporate what Massias sees as the future of education: the long need for apprenticeship.

“We see the current approach as heavily weighted in the classroom,” Massias said. “The more we can transcend the classroom from a one-way monologue to a dialogue, we are creating a bridge to a more interactive student population, which makes a higher probability of being a contributing member of society. If you can see yourself doing it, you’re one step closer to doing it.”

During the last five years, social media has shifted the way that journalists find and report news, making it more interactive and integrated with our daily communications. Kim Wilson and Elise DeFoe, former newsroom executive editors, created SocialNewsDesk (SND) to help journalists and newsrooms keep up with the fast-paced process.

SocialNewsDesk is a web-based social media platform that manages daily social media strategy for a newsroom and its journalists. While there are a number of social media management platforms on the market, Wilson said her company meets the specific needs of the newsroom.

“There are multi-millions of funding in a company like TweetDeck, so they look at one-size fits all solution. Our approach is different,” Wilson said. “Those solutions are phenomenal and they work for most people, but journalists are probably the one exception to that.”

Companies might post on Facebook once or twice each day, but journalists will post 10-15 times per day, using social media to find sources, provide updates and to release information that is relevant to the community.

With the increased interaction and traffic come challenges and opportunities that SocialNewsDesk will help manage.

“A newsroom environment is different than any other place on the planet,” Wilson said. “We make our tools simple and easy to manage. In a newsroom it has to be quick and easy or no one is going to use it. We understand that and can really add value for our clients.”

SocialNewsDesk provides two specific tools for its clients, the dashboard manager and custom applications for a station’s Facebook Timeline.

The first tool, SND Dashboard, allows the social media manager to track the number of posts across all of a station’s accounts, ensure that posts are following the organization’s social media guidelines, follow comments to help build the station’s social network and track a journalist’s content to ensure accountability.

Secondly, SocialNewsDesk focuses on a station’s Facebook Timeline to help build followers through contests and news-sharing, promote a newscast or story and to provide sellable space on a station’s page.

On Facebook, the company can build apps for contests to attract new fans or election coverage apps that educate the community on local issues and where candidates stand on important matters.

“The thing that sets us apart is the dashboard setting and our applications,” Wilson said. “You won’t find anyone making a customizable election application for a newsroom. Our contesting apps are different than what you’d find given our affiliation with newsrooms. The new Facebook Timeline puts a large emphasis on apps, so we become more and more valuable as the stations make their timelines a destination.”

A SocialNewsDesk case study showed that a news station with 20,000 Facebook fans could expect to generate more than 3.6 million impressions each month using SocialNewsDesk, equivalent to $67,000 per month on radio ads or $12,000-24,000 per month for a billboard.

Since its market launch last summer, SocialNewsDesk has attracted more than 20 newsrooms across the country as clients. Most of the company’s clients are television newsrooms, but Wilson believes the company has made a great start in the radio and print news industries as well.

Although her background is in journalism, Wilson said she is enjoying the transition to entrepreneur, and she is excited about the opportunities the Cade Prize will bring for the company.

“We’re Gainesville residents, so we’re familiar with the Prize and we loved the Cade mission,” she said. “We really wanted to be involved, and we worked so hard to be creative and start something new and we wanted to share that with the foundation and the community.”