This ability to cross disciplinary boundaries promises a payoff. Setagon — with the intellectual property that Reed and Lye created — has recently been acquired by one of the largest medical-device companies in the world. It saw in Setagon’s technology a potential solution for a number of problems associated with the current generation of stents. Stents today are coated with a polymer that releases a drug to prevent scarring of the blood vessel wall after angioplasty. Applying the polymer to the stent precisely has proven difficult, however, and the polymer has itself been implicated in scarring.

Reed and Lye, along with Gary Owens, the director of the University’s Cardiovascular Research Center, have developed a nanoporous metallic coating using a process that Reed encountered while working with Materials Science and Engineering Professor Robert Kelly. This coating can be made of the same material as the stent itself, making it easier to apply and potentially more effective in reducing scarring. “Nanoporous metals make an ideal delivery system for drugs,” Reed says. “They act like a sponge, with very fine pores that are a thousand times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.” Results from preclinical trials have so far been promising.

The patented technology that Reed, Lye, Owens and their colleagues have licensed is representative of the dozens of technologies developed by Engineering School professors that have been licensed by start-ups and moreestablished companies. They include ultrasonic medical imaging systems, using intellectual property patented by biomedical engineers William Walker and John Hossack and electrical engineer Travis Blalock; passive remote sensors for chemical weapons, created by mechanical engineer Gabriel Laufer; and new methods to increase the efficiency of photovoltaic cells, created by electrical engineers Mool Gupta and Barada Nayak.

The point of departure for all these innovations is, as Reed points out, “the engineers’ ability to learn things outside their field.”