Joseph Grudzinski, PhD’s healthcare start-up Voximetry was recently awarded the coveted “Golden Suitcase” award at the 2022 Pressure Chamber Competition hosted by the Greater Madison Area Chamber of Commerce. Next, the company will travel to Silicon Valley to seek angel investors at the end of September.
Voximetry specializes in radiopharmaceutical therapy and developed the software Torch® which helps clinicians develop patient-specific RPT treatment plans. Currently, Torch® is pending review for FDA market clearance. Following the close of a funding round this fall, Voximetry plans to build a sales team and establish its groundbreaking software and personalized treatments as the standard of care for RPT patients.
2022 has been a big one for Voximetry. In addition to winning the Pressure Chamber Competition, they are a finalist for the 2022 Wisconsin Innovation Awards and received several grants, including one from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC) and several from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
If you rewind to 2009, Joseph Grudzinski, then a Medical Physics graduate student, brought the idea of a treatment planning system for radiopharmaceutical therapy to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF). A patent was written and submitted to the patent office. Meanwhile, he finished his PhD the following year and joined Philips Radiation Oncology Systems (PROS), where he met Paul Wickre (Voximetry co-founder) and Dr. Sue Wallace (CEO of Voximetry).
At PROS, Dr. Grudzinski learned about commercial software development of radiation treatment planning systems. After one
year with the company, he received an offer from Jamey Weichert, PhD to join Cellectar, LLC, where he learned about clinical translation of radiopharmaceutical therapeutics. In 2016, he was hired as a Scientist in the University of Wisconsin – Madison Department of Medical Physics and simultaneously founded Voximetry with Paul Wickre, MS and Bryan Bednarz, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Physics.
In 2018, he transferred to the Department of Radiology, and Voximetry received a Phase I SBIR grant, which allowed Paul to work full-time on developing Torch®. In 2020, they received a Phase II SBIR grant which provided funds to support hiring a CEO, which led to the hiring of Sue Wallace to be CEO of Voximetry.
Today, the company has 5 full-time and 2 part-time employees, supported by a complement of expert consultants. Until now, the work at Voximetry has been funded exclusively by grant awards and contracts; however, the company is currently seeking investment for its first round of investor funding to accelerate commercialization beginning late this year.
We are very excited to see Voximetry’s growth and offer our congratulations on winning the Greater Madison Area Chamber of Commerce’s 2022 Pressure Chamber Competition.