Physicians Singh and Gaston Leverage the MESH Incubator, Gene and Cell Therapy Institute to Accelerate Image-Guided Type 1 Diabetes Treatment Device
Interventional Radiology and Vascular Surgery Physicians Singh and Gaston Leverage the MESH Incubator, Gene and Cell Therapy Institute to Accelerate Image-Guided Type 1 Diabetes Treatment Device
In late 2020, Varun Singh, MD, an interventional radiology resident, and Brandon Gaston, MD, a vascular surgery resident, met during their general surgery internships at Massachusetts General Hospital. Their friendship grew as they navigated their first year of clinical practice at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Singh, an interventional radiology clinician and trainee, shared ideas about islet cell transplantation with Gaston, a surgical trainee. Islet cell transplantation, a procedure where donor pancreas cells are transplanted to patients with Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus (T1DM) to produce insulin, has demonstrated limited long-term clinical success and requires multiple lines of lifelong immunosuppression. One question loomed large: how do we deliver human islet cells to protect them from ischemic failure while providing exogenous insulin freedom without the need for immunosuppression?
By the end of their internship, Singh and Gaston had constructed the idea for the IsletStent, an endovascular stent graft device encapsulating human islet cells for image-guided islet cell transplantation. With limited resources, Singh and Gaston sought support from Marc Succi, MD, Founder & Executive Director of the MESH (Medically Engineered Solutions in Healthcare) Incubator at Mass General Brigham. MESH educates faculty and staff and provides no-cost prototyping workshop access for those interested in device and software development. Singh had previously taken the MESH Core Healthcare Innovation Bootcamp – a first-of-its-kind hands-on innovation course at Mass General Brigham tailored to busy faculty – and knew about MESH’s on-the-ground physical workspace. The team established a key collaboration with Dr. James Markmann, former Chief of the Division of Transplantation, to provide cell-line expertise. The team’s early research using modified perfusion circuits in the laboratory of Dr. Korkut Uygun demonstrated encouraging results in the ability of islet cells seeded in the IsletStent to respond appropriately to changing glucose concentrations with appropriate insulin secretion. This research was presented at the 2024 Society of Interventional Radiology Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah and was awarded the 2024 Society of Interventional Radiology Resident Research Award. Mass General Brigham filed a PCT patent related to the IsletStent technology in 2023.
Singh was subsequently awarded the inaugural 2024-2026 MESH Incubator Executive Innovation Fellowship to obtain focused training in medical device innovation, commercialization, and executive leadership under the direct mentorship of Succi, who will continue to serve as advisor for the IsletStent startup as well as senior author of the team’s upcoming publication. Gaston and Singh, leveraging the advisement of Succi and Angela Shen, MD, won a Mass General Brigham Gene and Cell Therapy Institute $150,000 CMC (Chemistry, Manufacturing, and Controls) grant to advance engineering and manufacturing of the IsletStent device and perform further pre-clinical experiments. For the millions living with Type 1 diabetes, the IsletStent innovation offers a potential beacon of hope. The IsletStent collaboration is a testament to the power of patient-centered excellence in innovation and interdisciplinary mentorship at Mass General Brigham, as well as Mass General Brigham Innovation’s on-the-ground development programs to aid faculty and staff with new ideas.
About the Mass General Brigham MESH Incubator: The MESH Incubator (est. 2016) is an in-house hardware and software accelerator at Mass General Brigham and Harvard Medical School. The first incubator of its kind integrated into a hospital system, and with a physical location on the ground, MESH has actively created and supported over 2,500 clinicians and researchers since 2016 through projects, patents, company-formation, innovation education, and more. MESH also operates MESH Core, the official certificate Healthcare Innovation Bootcamp and annual conference for Mass General Brigham, now held on-site in multiple continents.