Gaurav Pranami is the vice president of research and development at Imbed Biosciences Inc. and his passions run deep, from wound care to battling climate change.
Pranami’s education and career track have taken him on quite a journey. It began with a Bachelor of Technology degree from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi; a Ph.D. from Iowa State University; and a postdoc in chemical engineering at UW–Madison. Before joining Imbed Biosciences in 2014, he spent four years working at Dow Chemical Co.
With Imbed, he’s helping to advance wound and burn treatments, and the need is great. An estimated 2.5% of the U.S. population suffers from chronic wounds, and about 486,000 burn injuries are recorded in the U.S. each year that require medical treatment or hospitalization.
Beyond business, Pranami fights climate change in a separate startup he formed with his younger sister in 2020. We spoke with him recently to learn more.
Tell us about Imbed Biosciences.
Imbed is a privately held medical device company and a tissue-engineering company developing advanced therapies for the treatment of burns, chronic ulcers, gastrointestinal defects, and soft-tissue repair. Within the wound-care space there is a lot of diversity and breadth. Our technology is a platform capable of delivering a variety of therapeutics as we build our portfolio. We have commercial products and products under development that present bioactive molecules on wound surfaces to combat local pain and infection.
What’s your role, specifically?
I provide technical leadership at all levels. That means identifying unmet needs in wound care and ideas for new product development, leading the development of new products that address these needs and the development of processes for manufacturing them at the lab. I file the regulatory submissions with the FDA and other regulatory bodies to enable product commercialization, develop collaborations, and I write grants to attract federal funds for supporting research and product development. We wrote five grants to the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense in 2021–22, and all five were awarded, totaling to $13.75 million.
What about patents?
We have several pending patent applications and patents that have been granted in the U.S. and abroad. These cover the design and manufacture of an ultra-thin polymeric scaffold that acts like a synthetic skin substitute that helps difficult wounds heal.
Our first FDA-cleared product is an antimicrobial synthetic skin substitute containing low levels of silver that kills bacteria without impairing wound healing. It launched in 2019 and thus far, more than a quarter million patients with a variety of debilitating wounds have benefited from using our product. These include difficult-to-heal chronic wounds like diabetic ulcers, venous stasis ulcers and pressure sores, a variety of burn wounds including radiation burns, and high-risk surgical wounds for alleviating the risk of surgical site infections.
There must be some exciting outcomes.
Yes! Diabetic patients with wounds open for as long as a year have had their wounds close in four or eight weeks, depending on the type of wound. One little girl had burns all over her head and face, but just three months after receiving our product, the burns were completely healed with no scarring! We’re very excited about the outcomes.
What else is Imbed Biosciences working on?
We have an ongoing collaboration with the Department of Defense to develop a product specifically for war fighters — our U.S. soldiers. DOD is looking for therapies that can be deployed on the battlefield to keep the burns from getting worse, or at least to stabilize them. We are working on developing a product that is very lightweight, shelf stable, and temperature stable and doesn’t require special storage conditions. It is an honor to be involved in this work because these soldiers are out there putting their lives on the line every day for people like us.
Let’s talk about your family.
My parents are retired and still live in India. My dad was a pharmacist at a government hospital and my mom was a middle school teacher. My sister, Garima, lives in New York City. She’s a model who has been on the covers of numerous magazines, including Marie Claire and Vogue, and she’s worked for brands like L’Oréal and Avon. I am extremely proud of her success. We talk almost every day.
We both care deeply about our environment and manage our actions so that we are living in a sustainable manner. We came up with the idea of replacing single-use plastic plates and bowls with plates and bowls that are made only from leaves. We now have a small startup, Folium Ware (foliumware.com). These products are chemical-free with no additives, just plant leaves. They are as green as possible on the sustainability spectrum.
Is this a new idea?
No. It’s very common in India. When we were young, we used to go with our parents to the market and eat street food that was served in these bowls and then throw them away with no harm done to the environment. So, Garima and I want to replace plastic plates and bowls with these products made in Nepal. It provides an economic benefit to that local economy too, improving their quality of living. At the same time, we can replace less sustainable products with more sustainable ones.
We really want to work with institutional customers — stadiums, for example. Thousands of people walk through stadium doors for events that last only a few hours yet generate an enormous amount of trash. If they could provide leaf plates and bowls, they could convert almost all of that waste into compost, which enriches the soil as opposed to generating waste that goes into the landfill. It would help large customers meet their zero-waste goals and make a measurable difference to the carbon emissions and environmental footprint these events produce.
What legacy would you like to leave one day?
As a child, my mom always told me inspiring stories about people who made huge sacrifices for others, like Mahatma Gandhi, or authors or scientists, to inspire me to not only take care of my own self but to help others too. I’m only 42, but one day I hope that by my actions, my legacy will be to leave this world better than I found it.
