Caleb Stine, a postdoctoral fellow in Professor Jennifer Munson’s lab at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC and co-founder of Cairina Inc., was recently awarded a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship through Virginia Tech’s LAUNCH: Center for New Ventures .
The innovation award will help Stine commercialize Cairina’s technology and software, which helps medical professionals provide personalized drug delivery to cancer patients.
Cairina stemmed from a research collaboration between scientists at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute in Roanoke and City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, California. It gets its name from a real event that reflects the research.
In the early 1990s, thousands of rubber duck bath toys were washed overboard an ocean liner in the Pacific Ocean. The event allowed scientists and educators to develop models that accurately tracked where the ducks would end up and when, based on ocean currents.
Years later, while writing code to analyze fluid flow in the brain, co-founder and mathematical oncologist Jessica Cunningham recognized similarities between rubber ducks traveling in the ocean and cancer cells traveling in the brain. Thus, Cairina Inc. received its name from a genus of ducks found all over the world.