Hai-Quan Mao Featured as Tech Entrepreneur INBT Associate Director Hai-Quan Mao was featured in the winter issue of JHU En-
cells in the surrounding damaged tissue repair or grow new tissue.
gineering Magazine about technology entrepreneurship. With the creation of the Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures, the university has been strongly advocating and supporting Hopkins community members to engage in enterprise to accelerate technology transfer and commercialization. Founded in 2015 by Mao, Justin Sacks, Sashank Reddy, and Russell Martin, with seed funding from Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures’s FastForward program, LifeSprout LLC specializes in a synthetic regenerative material of biodegradable nanofibers infused in a hydrogel. The materials mimics the body’s natural tissue microenvironment and acts as a scaffold in wounds or soft tissue space. The scaffold helps
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Mao attributes his success to close collaboration with his market audience. Making sure a product can survive on the market, the product needs to be designed with clear understanding of how it will be used in the clinic. Such a product is more likely to be successful when you can engage surgeons and practitioners to build it from scratch and include critical features from the users’ perspectives.