Melisse Shaban’s Virtue Labs Took Six Years to Build a Product

Melisse Shaban was sitting on her deck one day, staring out over the ocean, wondering what her next project should be, when the answer came to her in the form of a phone call. “I was thinking, is 5 o’clock too early for a martini, or should it be 5:30?” Shaban said. Then the beauty industry veteran got a call from Shaun Westfall, now an investment banker with Jefferies, who asked her to take a look at a piece of technology from the ex-chief executive officer of Medtronic, William Hawkins. Turns out, Hawkins was her next door neighbor at the beach. She went to look at the technology and met Luke Burnett, a bio-tissue engineer and colonel in the army. He told her about how the army was good at certain types of care — especially from bullet wounds — but wasn’t able to give that same quality of care for people who were injured by explosives. “We hadn’t caught up to bone, tissue, muscle regeneration, 3-D printing skin, so quality of life for people who had served on our behalf was really a challenge, and Luke dedicated his life to finding devices, drugs and proteins that would help in an effort to improve

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from WWDWWD http://bit.ly/2R60pBh