Seattle’s Health Innovators of the Year: Industry Group Recognizes 7 Leaders in the Field

Washington’s life sciences industry has a habit of flying under the radar, despite the innovative and impactful work being done in labs and clinics around the state every day. But once a year, the Seattle Health Innovation Forum brings this work to the top by recognizing local leaders in health innovation, from researchers to startup mentors to those changing the way we communicate about health.

The 2016 Health Innovator of the Year awardees include Ingrid Swanson Pultz, a senior research fellow at the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design and the Chief Scientific Officer at PvP Biologics. She received the Imagination Award, which recognizes imaginative problem-solving in the health sciences. Throughout her academic career, Pultz has worked to develop a treatment for Celiac disease, a genetic disorder that makes the body unable to digest gluten and can lead to serious damage to the digestive system.  Pultz has engineered proteins that sit in the digestive tract and can digest gluten, effectively treating the disease. At PvP Biologics, she is working to get the treatment approved by the FDA.

The awardees also include Col. Douglas Maurer, who was awarded for his work encouraging collaboration between healthcare institutions and startups. A full-time physician and teacher at Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Wash., Maurer also makes time outside of work to meet with, support and perform research with early stage health companies. This collaboration gives startups an inside look at real-world healthcare systems, and assists them in the tricky process of entering the health space...