Endeavors magazine: Life and death by the numbers

Pediatrician Keith Kocis was a medical resident in the 1980s when his mentor created a way to assign mortality risk scores to critically ill children. Twenty years later, doctors still assign such scores when a child is admitted into the ICU but don’t update the scores after treatment begins.

Kocis thought there was room for improvement. He devised a way to analyze vital signs to provide a continuously updated mortality risk score. In real time, doctors could see on screen how a variety of biological factors, such as a varying heart rate and blood pressure, interact and contribute to a worsening score. Doctors could then alter treatment accordingly.

Kocis worked with his brother Daniel Kocis, a statistician in New York, and Carolina’s Renaissance Computing Institute to build a prototype model that predicts mortality risk. The team received funds from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and in clinical trials the model worked well. But part of the NIH grant required a commercialization plan. “I had no idea what that meant,” Kocis says. “I’m trained to develop studies and do clinical trials.” So he met with Randy Myer and Ted Zoller, business school professors who run a program called Launching the Venture to help UNC students and faculty develop business plans for startup companies and new products.

“Without the entrepreneurship programs, there’s no doubt our idea would’ve ended in my lab,” Kocis says. Kocis and his team now have a medical device that’s ready for the commercial market and a business plan to back it up. He’s searching for investors and ways to partner with manufacturers of ICU monitors.

Keith Kocis is a professor of anesthesia and an adjunct professor of biomedical engineering in the School of Medicine. Launching the Venture is run jointly by the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies and the Office of Technology Development, the only UNC-Chapel Hill office authorized to execute license agreements with companies. In 2008, Kocis received a grant from the University of North Carolina Research Competitiveness Fund to develop two other devices, one for neonatal intensive care and the second for pediatric care outside the ICU.