Building a Healing Structure: How VascuArch Is Turning Research into a Wound-Care Startup
- May 18
- 5 min read
The Covid pandemic altered the scientific landscape in many lasting ways. For Stony Brook University’s Dr. Shi Fu, it was the catalyst for a pivot towards healthcare. Today, Dr. Fu serves in a leadership role at VascuArch Inc., a startup developing advanced skin substitutes designed to improve healing for chronic wounds and serious injuries.
Founded by Stony Brook University faculty Dr. Gurtej Singh, VascuArch is working to solve a major challenge in wound care: many existing skin graft products lack built-in blood vessels, which can slow integration with the body and delay healing.
“Our product is completely lab-grown,” Fu said. “We use biomaterials to create blood vessels in the lab. Our innovation is incorporating vascular networks—blood vessels—into skin substitutes.”
That concept is reflected in the company’s name, VascuArch, combining “vascular” and “architecture” to describe a healing structure built with engineered blood vessel networks.
“It’s like a very high-tech Band-Aid,” Fu said. “It doesn’t heal your skin for you; your own body heals the wound. But the bandage does more than offer protection. It’s applying a ‘skin’ to the wound that integrates into your body and provides blood vessels that join with your own blood vessels to bring more nutrients and accelerate healing.”
Dr. Fu earned his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering in China before completing a master’s degree at Stony Brook University. During the pandemic, while pursuing his PhD, he decided to focus on biomaterials and regenerative medicine, so he could have a greater impact on health and improving the lives of others.
He had previously worked on 3D bioprinted skin models, which utilize living cells and biological materials, and co-authored research comparing bioprinting methods with traditional approaches. But as the work advanced, Fu and his collaborators saw a larger opportunity: creating skin substitutes with built-in blood vessels that could significantly improve healing outcomes.
“With my mechanical engineering background, I saw a place where I could make a real impact,” Fu said.
The idea was further shaped through collaboration with Dr. Alexandar B. Dagum, an internationally recognized plastic surgeon, who helped identify the clinical need for faster-healing vascularized skin products.
Through a regional I-Corps program in 2024 and the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program in 2025, Fu served as Entrepreneurial Lead for the company. Dr. Singh served as Technical Lead. As part of the process, the team interviewed 115 stakeholders, including surgeons, emergency physicians, hospital purchasing leaders, reimbursement specialists, and industry representatives. Those interviews helped the company identify its first beachhead market: chronic wounds caused by diabetic ulcers.
“Our biggest takeaway from I-Corps was that strong science alone is not enough,” Fu said. “You need to understand what customers want. Doctors are not only looking at how well something works; they also want to know if it will be reimbursed. That’s the kill-switch for whether it can enter the market.”
“It’s not just about whether a product is needed,” Fu added. “It also has to be easy to use, heal wounds quickly, and make financial sense for the people involved in manufacturing, distribution, and patient care.”
The team also learned that cosmetic features such as skin tone matching were not top priorities for many clinicians in the diabetic ulcer market. Instead, doctors emphasized rapid vascular integration and faster healing.
Another insight from customer discovery was that for some patients, adhering to religious customs means they cannot use a skin graft made from an animal source, such as a pig or cow. “Our technology is a lab-engineered skin substitute created using human cells to generate a self-renewing tissue structure, which is then "decellularized," keeping the structure but removing the original cells **to reduce the risk of rejection in the final, implantable product. While current manufacturing uses some animal-derived collagen and fibrin components, we are actively working to reduce reliance on animal materials over time,” Fu said.
“That said, using non-animal skin sources was not our primary driver at the outset,” he added. “However, through customer discovery, we recognized that avoiding animal-derived skin is an important consideration for certain patients, for religious reasons as well as broader concerns about compatibility and supply consistency. While our process may use animal-derived biomaterials such as collagen, we are not using animal skin as a graft source. Instead, we engineer skin with blood vessels using human cells, which we then use to create a scaffold designed to minimize an immune response. We are now more intentionally highlighting our ‘lab-grown’ feature as part of our product’s value proposition.”
VascuArch has built early momentum through startup support programs, grants, and national recognition. Fu credited mentors Dr. Shruti Sharma of Stony Brook University and Peter Donnelly of the Long Island High Technology Incubator (LIHTI) for helping to guide the company’s early growth. He also praised support from the New York I-Corps Hub and the NYC Innovation Hot Spot team at CUNY, including Ariella Trotsenko, John Blaho, and Cira Cardaci. The company’s growth has been further strengthened by guidance from advisors, collaborators, and supporters across Stony Brook University (Drs. Sami U Khan, Dee Dao, and Nicos Labropoulos) and SUNY Venture Advisors, including Allison Yacci and Douglas Benel.
That support helped the company access funding opportunities, business strategy guidance, and travel support for customer discovery. The team was funded to attend the New York State Innovation Summit hosted by Fuzehub and Emprie State Development's NYSTAR Division in Rochester last year, where Fu said they made valuable biotech industry connections and gained new perspectives. They also were also funded to attend the Northeast Burn Conference in Washington, D.C., where they learned more about reimbursement systems in wound care.
Most recently, VascuArch graduated as one of 15 teams selected for the highly competitive AccelCorps program at the Gies College of Business. Developed through a National Science Foundation-funded initiative, AccelCorps is designed to help STEM researchers translate breakthrough technologies into scalable startups through advanced commercialization training, mentorship, and market validation. The program builds upon the NSF I-Corps methodology and provides intensive support focused on startup launch, minimum viable product development, and long-term commercialization strategy.
The company has also secured roughly $800,000 in non-dilutive funding from sources including The Mathers Foundation, SUNY Technology Accelerator Fund, the National Science Foundation, and the Center for Biotechnology at Stony Brook University.
VascuArch is currently in pre-clinical development. Fu said the company has completed successful mouse studies and is now moving into pig studies, whose skin more closely resembles human skin. The company hopes to pursue an efficient U.S. Food and Drug Administration pathway by demonstrating how its product compares with existing approved treatments.
“We’ve had strong early results,” Fu said. “If the pig studies go well, our next step would be scale-up and understanding the reimbursement pathway.”
VascuArch is also exploring a second product opportunity based on another pain point uncovered during customer discovery: monitoring wound healing over time. The team is developing a non-invasive tool called Digital Image Speckle Correlation (DISC), designed to measure healing using touch-based sensors and digital imaging. Fu said the long-term goal is a system that could be used remotely. The company is considering joining another I-Corps cohort to further explore the commercial potential of that technology.
“Doctors want better ways to track how wounds heal,” Fu said. “Right now, that process can be subjective, and it can be difficult for patients to travel regularly to a wound care center, especially those who live far away.”
The broader VascuArch team now includes Dr. Singh, Dr. Dagum, Dr. Marcia Simon, and Dr. Miriam Rafailovich. Despite growing momentum, Fu said one of the biggest challenges is balancing startup growth with academic responsibilities.
“Our biggest challenge is simply not having enough time for everything we want to do,” he said. “We are a startup, but we also have academic responsibilities. We work constantly.”
The pace can be demanding, he said, leaving little time for his favorite hobby, fishing. But Fu remains focused on the long-term opportunity.
“It’s hard to be a postdoctoral researcher and run a startup at the same time,” Fu said. “But we believe in our product and in the path ahead. The more support we earn, the faster we can grow.”
