“This is the first of, hopefully a series, of what we’re calling innovation celebrations,” said Charles Hasemann, interim executive director of MSU Technologies. “We’re inviting people from the business community who support the different things we do.”

Hasemann said the showcase invited venture capitalists, university leaders and the faculty inventors to come together and discuss the possibilities of the faculty’s inventions.

A. Mahdi Saeed, a professor of epidemiology who has done research in food science and safety, attended the event to showcase a vaccine he had developed against a strain of the E. coli bacteria.

“Currently, there is no such vaccine,” he said. “One third of the 36 million travelers that go to the southern hemisphere suffer (from) diarrhea caused by this bacteria.”

Saeed’s vaccine earned him recognition by Discover Magazine in 2009 as one of the top 100 discoveries that are changing the world.

Currently, Saeed said he is in discussion with pharmaceutical companies to approve the vaccine through clinical trials. He said he hopes to administer the vaccine in patch form, not through a needle injection.

“Wear the patch a couple times while you travel, you become immune,” he said. “Hopefully, that would be much more acceptable to people who fear injections.”

Ramakrishna Mukkamala, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, developed a more accurate and less invasive method of measuring blood flow — one of the most important cardiovascular attributes to monitor, he said.

“The standard has been the catheter,” he said. “It’s extremely invasive. It used to be inserted in 3 million patients a year, but because of its invasiveness, it’s only being used in 400,000 patients.”

Mukkamala said his method builds upon a device that’s already used — but he’s found an algorithm that makes the device significantly more accurate.

“These methods, they look at one beat of blood pressure signal,” he said. “There’s more information from beat to beat. We’re looking at all the information, whereas these are only looking at select information.”

Mukkamala said he hopes to start a company in Lansing based on his findings.

If these faculty inventions reach commercial success, Hasemann said, MSU will receive a portion of the profits in the form of royalties.

“I think there’s a little bit of fame and ego that comes with this,” he said. “To take your invention and your laboratory thing, and turn it into something that you’ve translated in the real world where it’s helping people, that really floats my boat.”