Biomedical engineering startups present to investors at JHU Innovation Summit
When Bailey Surtees graduated in 2017 from Johns Hopkins University with a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering, the Oklahoma City native embarked on turning her senior research project into a viable company that marries cryotherapy with veterinarian medicine.
Three years later, with the help of Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures (JHTV), Surtees became the co-founder and chief executive officer of Kubanda Cryotherapy—a company that uses a cryogenic technology that she and her co-founder, Clarisse Hu, Engr ’17, ’19 (MS), developed at Hopkins to deliver affordable, in-clinic treatments for “lumps, bumps, and tumors” on pets.
On a recent afternoon in Baltimore, Surtees pitched their company to dozens of investors who gathered for Johns Hopkins’ inaugural Innovation Summit, organized by JHTV, the Carey Business School, the Department of Biomedical Engineering, PTX Capital, and a local nonprofit research institute, Blackbird Laboratories.
“We spun out of Johns Hopkins in 2020,” Surtees said on a Brown Advisory stage set against glimmering waterfront views of the Inner Harbor. “We’re in the home stretch of a $1.6 million seed round to allow us to scale to 100 clinics, refine our manufacturing for volume, and deploy accredited training programs with a focus on veterinarian schools and corporate trainings.”
Once the company establishes a profitable operation in the “beachhead” veterinarian market, it intends to expand into the low-cost breast cancer cryoablation treatments the team first developed in South Africa. Kubanda means “ice” in Zulu.
The trajectory of Surtees and Hu, who also graduated from Hopkins with a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering and a master’s in engineering, is precisely the type of success story that Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures envisioned when it formed a decade ago.
The event also featured Hopkins doctoral candidates, Kent Rapp and Kevin Wen, who pitched their startup, Biolinco, which provides state-of-the-art technology to find the best cell lines for faster, more affordable drug manufacturing. Rapp, who recently completed his doctorate, and Wen both work in the lab of Michael Betenbaugh, a Johns Hopkins professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and lead principal investigator of the Advanced Mammalian Biomanufacturing Innovation Center at the Whiting School of Engineering. Rapp is also a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biomedical Engineering in the lab of Reza Kalhor, assistant professor of biomedical engineering.
Their company is just getting started, relying on the intersection of support JHTV has fostered over the past 10 years, including via the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps Program and an accelerator run out of JHTV’s Pava Marie LaPere Center for Entrepreneurship.
“To date we have received more than $300,000,” Rapp said. “In 2026 we expect to obtain our first sponsored user contract or pilot user contract with the goal of full commercialization in 2027 and beyond.”
The Department of Biomedical Engineering is proud to have contributed to the vision of the Innovation Summit as well as being able to showcase startups like Kubanda Cryotherapy and Biolinco. To learn more about the Innovation Summit, see the full article on the Hub.