“I never thought I would form a company in my life,” says Pitt ophthalmology chair José-Alain Sahel. “But it just happens that if you want to deliver therapies to patients, it’s the only way to make things happen.” 

Sahel, an MD and Distinguished Professor, receives emails every day from people around the world who ask if he has treatments that will restore their vision. In most cases, the answer is: “Not yet.” But in some cases, he’s able to respond with a satisfying: “Yes.” Sahel and collaborators are creating interventions for a wide range of diseases that cause vision impairment and blindness. He has launched a dozen companies to commercialize those therapies. 

Recently, along with Leah Byrne, a PhD assistant professor of ophthalmology, and Paul Sieving from the University of California, Davis (former director of the National Eye Institute), Sahel cofounded Avista Therapeutics. Byrne engineers vehicles—called AAVs (adeno-associated virus vectors)—to deliver genetic materials into eye cells for restoring vision. Avista is commercializing products based on her AAV engineering platform, which is nicknamed scAAVengr.

The scAAVengr method, which is still in preclinical development, investigates the performance of multiple AAVs in thousands of cells by tagging every AAV with a barcode and then evaluating whether each cell receives the needed genetic material from the AAV and expresses it. Byrne uses scAAVengr for vision research, though­—“The platform could be applied to any tissue type, including the brain, heart, liver, kidney,” she says.

Avista intends to collaborate on AAV manufacturing with ElevateBio at BioForge. (See page 16 story.) 

At this stage, Avista is funded primarily by UPMC Enterprises. This innovation arm of the health system plans to invest $1 billion in life sciences startups by 2024, according to Jeanne Cunicelli, president of UPMC Enterprises and a veteran venture capitalist. 

Pitt and UPMC have been collaborating on commercialization since the 1990s, says surgeon Timothy Billiar, the George Vance Foster Professor, as well as chief scientific officer and executive vice president of UPMC. He’s chaired Pitt’s Department of Surgery for 24 years. In the early days, the commercialization focus was on digital products. About six years ago, Pitt and UPMC created a more formal structure for biological technologies, benefiting from Cunicelli’s “very disciplined mindset around how to invest­,” says Billiar. Several of the resulting companies have already made significant progress and have partnerships with, or been acquired by, pharmaceutical companies. 

Avista is partnering with Roche, notes Rob Lin, a PhD who is CEO of Avista and helped fund its early research when he was vice president at UPMC Enterprises. 

Moving breakthroughs into the clinic so they can benefit patients is a top priority for Dean Anantha Shekhar, an MD, PhD whose own discoveries for psychiatric disorders have been spun off into startups. In 2022, he brought Evan Facher, a PhD and MBA who was already Pitt’s vice chancellor for innovation and entrepreneurship, onto his leadership team as associate dean for commercial translation in the School of Medicine. Among other charges, Facher helps discern which med school innovations are truly ripe for commercialization. (In fiscal year 2022 alone, Pitt Med researchers filed 251 patent applications.)

Facher’s team welcomes new companies into a dynamic business environment through LifeX, an organization founded by Pitt that helps early stage life sciences companies in the region secure funding.

Pittsburgh’s progress and ambition are exciting for clinicians like Sahel who are eager to respond with “yes” when patients ask: “Do you have any treatments to help me?”

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