One out of every six San Antonians is employed in the biosciences and health care industry, and it’s easy to see why. The Alamo City is one of the nation’s leading hubs in these fields. UTSA, along with UT Health San Antonio, the Texas Biomedical Research Institute and the Southwest Research Institute have all produced talented students and contemporary thinking in the life sciences, engineering and other STEM careers, even teaming up for important research through collaborations like the San Antonio Partnership for Precision Therapeutics. Bexar County is also home to the South Texas Medical Center and global MedTech companies like 3M and Medtronic, in addition to serving as a haven for military medicine.
Needless to say, this hotbed of innovation and expertise has become an appealing destination for many medical device, biologic and pharmaceutical manufacturing companies looking to break through. One of them is Vascular Perfusion Solutions (VPS), which seeks to revolutionize the technology surrounding organ transplants with a hypothermic heart preservation system that can preserve organs and tissue for longer than the current standard-of-care method, ice coolers.
“As a startup, it has become increasingly important to think about creative ways that we can build our company,” says Rafael Veraza, chief executive officer and president of VPS.
One of those creative avenues the company established was an internship program with UTSA students, which provided the talent VPS needed at an opportune time. VPS’s internships are designed to give the students a hands-on experience where they actually get to do high-level science and research.
“First, we had two interns over the summer, then that grew,” Veraza says. “Because the UTSA students were so creative and talented, we decided that we had to find a way to hire them on full-time.”
Of VPS’s team of 10, three of them are UTSA alumni who started as interns before being hired full-time.
“The students at UTSA have all of the engineering and scientific skills they need, but they also have qualities beyond those skills that are so appealing to us,” says Kristina Andrijauskaite, chief scientific and technology officer. “UTSA students are self-assured and come with such a wide variety of skills, which makes them so valuable to a growing company like ours.”
Isabella Cano ’22 was one of the first Roadrunners at VPS to make the jump from intern to full-time employee. For many of her adolescent years, Cano thought she might become a doctor or a surgeon one day, but during her sophomore year of high school, she discovered that UTSA had launched a biomedical engineering program and became fascinated with both the university and this cutting-edge area of study.
Cano got involved right away as a freshman at UTSA. In her first year, she met frequently with her mentor, biomedical engineering professor Laura Gaviria, to explore what the vast field of biomedical engineering had to offer. She also attended events and career fairs organized by the Student Success Center at the Margie and Bill Klesse College of Engineering and Integrated Design, where she would learn about employers, local biomed ventures and STEM nonprofits.
“I made it my mission my freshman year going forward to always attend the events hosted by the university to network, even if I wasn’t trying to get a job out of it,” Cano says.
For three years, Cano participated in Quality of Life Plus (QL+), a program that challenges college students to create innovative technology strategies to improve the quality of life for injured veterans and first responders. She led or contributed to many QL+ projects to create medical device solutions for the San Antonio community. She then continued to assist veterans during her first internship, where she designed medical devices for Central Texas Veterans Affairs.
Here, Cano designed a “cell stretching” device using 3D software that allowed researchers to more closely analyze cells. More importantly, she expanded her knowledge of systolic heart disease, learned how to analyze echocardiograms and found herself enamored with the mechanisms of the heart.
This knowledge would come in handy during an internship at VPS, where Cano parlayed those previously-honed skills to further develop heart transplant technologies. An unpaid internship turned into a paid internship with more responsibilities, which then turned into a full-time position as a research engineer after she graduated from UTSA in 2022.
“Isabella is such an important part of our team,” Andrijauskaite says. “She is willing to jump into different tasks and take on challenges that are even outside of her area of expertise. She has all of the right skills. She can do the science that we need, but she can also speak confidently to external audiences.”
As a research engineer, Cano carries out viability and functional tests on the device with animal hearts — and sometimes even human hearts — that are donated for research. She runs test simulations to evaluate the system’s performance for parameters, such as flow and pressure, as the company gears up for the device’s FDA submission. Cano has also designed and manufactured systems that complement the device, from custom-made cooling packs to the pivotal cardiac cannula equipment that attaches to the heart.
“It was so rewarding seeing something that started as an idea in my head go from a drawing to a working product being used,” she says.
In addition to her research, Cano is often leading the charge for the VPS social media and marketing initiatives. She’s even organizing the company’s booths and outreach efforts at national conferences. It’s hard, multi-faceted work. And yet, Cano attests, it’s worth it to be working toward something so meaningful.
“I would have never thought I would have been doing some of the things that I’m doing now,” Cano says.
