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MICHAEL L. WEINER
The Technology Review article
Defibrillation's Alternative:
A new approach would stop ventricular fibrillation before it
started said
Treating a failing heart by zapping it with a painful, powerful
electrical shock has become the standard procedure. Now, a medical device
company, based in West Henrietta, NY, has patented a technique that
avoids the need for such dramatic treatment, by predicting the onset of
fibrillation — the heart rhythm that can lead to sudden death —
and
treating it before it occurs.
The preventative treatment does, like defibrillation, involve
electrically stimulating the heart, says Michael Weiner, CEO of Biophan
Technologies. But this new technique's weak signal would be minuscule
compared to the jolt that defibrillators normally deliver. "I know
patients with defibrillators who live in fear of that son-of-a-gun going
off", he says.
Michael L. Weiner
began his career at
Xerox Corporation in 1975, where he served in a
variety of capacities in sales and marketing, including manager of
software market expansion and manager of sales compensation planning. In
1982, he received the President's Award, the top honor at Xerox for an
invention benefiting a major product line. In 1985, he founded
Microlytics, a Xerox spin-off company which developed technology from
the
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) into a suite of products,
including
the
award winning
Word Finder thesaurus, with licenses out to over 150
companies, including Apple, Microsoft, and Sony. Microlytics was acquired
by a merger with a public company in 1990, which he then headed up
through 1993.
In January 1993, Mike cofounded
TextWise,
a company
developing natural language search technologies for the intelligence
community. In 1995, he cofounded and served as CEO of
Manning &
Napier Information Services (MNIS), a Rochester-based company
providing
parent analytics, prior art searches, and other services, for the U.S.
Patent and Trademark Office and many large corporations, and which
subsequently acquired TextWise. He held this position until January
1999. MNIS remains private, and has generated several spin-off companies
(Talavara and IP.COM). TextWise won the
Department of Commerce Tibbetts Award for SBIR research in
1998.
In February 1999, Mike founded
Technology Innovations, LLC, to develop
intellectual property assets. In August 2000, Technology Innovations
created a subsidiary,
Biomed Solutions, LLC, to pursue biomedical and
nanotechnology opportunities, investing in embryonic-to-seed stage
innovations which generate new ventures and/or licenses. These companies
are holding companies for intellectual property assets and equities in
other ventures.
He has been CEO of
Biophan Technologies, Inc. (Ray Kurzweil is on
its
Scientific Advisory Board!) since cofounding the
company in December 2000, with
Wilson Greatbatch, P.E., the inventor of
the first successful implantable cardiac pacemaker, which Greatbatch
licensed to
Medtronic in 1960. Biophan's primary mission is to develop
and commercially exploit technologies for providing competitive advantage
to
biomedical device companies, including technology for enabling
biomedical devices to be safe and compatible with
MRI diagnostics.
Biophan spun out of
Biomed Solutions in December 2000, through a merger
with a public company, trading under the symbol BIPH. Biophan recently
acquired a majority interest in
TE-Bio, LLC, which is developing with
NASA a patented biothermal battery for powering implantable devices
based
on thermal deltas in body heat, taking advantage of advances in
nanomaterials.
Mike serves on the Boards of Biophan, Biomed Solutions, LLC, Technology
Innovations, LLC, Speech Compression Technologies, LP,
Nanoset, LLC,
Myotech, LLC, TE-Bio, LLC, and
OncoVista, Inc. These companies, all
founded or cofounded by him, hold over 200 patents pending, issued,
allowed, and/or licensed in (Biophan alone currently has over
150).
He has been a member of the
Licensing Executives Society (LES) since
1984, and is a member of
IEEE,
AAAS,
AFIO, and the NY Inventor's Club.
He believes that society can benefit by improving the methods by
which innovation moves from idea to application and
commercialization.
Mike wrote the KurzweilAI.net article
Simulating Reality.
Read his interview in
View
From The Top.
Listen to
Mike's
interview at the Milken Institute Global Conference.
Listen to him talk about
developments at
Biophan.
Read his interview with
IEEE Spectrum.
Print bio!
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