2025 Report to the Community - Flipbook - Page 22
Discovery & Innovation Highlights
Hollings researchers represent South Carolina science
among international group in entrepreneurship boot camp
A startup founded by two MUSC Hollings Cancer Center
researchers is the only South Carolina company selected
to participate in the SCbioDrive accelerator program in
spring 2025. Besim Ogretmen, Ph.D., and Shikhar
Mehrotra, Ph.D., co-founded Lipo-Immuno Tech to
provide a vehicle for commercializing their work.
Ogretmen is an international leader in understanding how
sphingolipid signaling can promote cancer development.
He serves as associate director for basic science at
Hollings and director of the Lipidomics Shared Resource.
Mehrotra’s specialty is cellular therapies. His work has led
to a clinical trial of a patented version of CAR-T cells to
treat certain B-cell lymphomas. He also serves as coleader of the Cancer Biology and Immunology Research
Program at Hollings.
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They started Lipo-Immuno Tech to bridge the gap
between lab research and clinical trials. Promising drugs
typically need funding support during this development
phase before pharmaceutical companies show interest.
The accelerator program connected Ogretmen and
Mehrotra with mentors who met with them to review how
to pitch their company, the specific skill sets they need in
staff and the regulatory and intellectual property laws they
need to be aware of.
Ogretmen said the mentors provided invaluable insight
into how investors think. “How to actually focus our
product lines, what to actually tell the investors, what
they want to hear – it’s completely different than what
academicians like us present. Usually, we go into a deep
dive of the science,” Ogretmen said.
MUSC Hollings Cancer Center
