Entrepreneur of the Year 2022

Kevin McCully’s research has helped further the understanding of peripheral arterial disease, or PAD, through the use of near-infrared spectroscopy to measure blood flow and mitochondrial function in skeletal muscle. His work has led to one issued patent and multiple pending applications. Along with collaborators Jonathan Murrow and Kent Nilsson—both faculty members in the Augusta University/UGA Medical Partnership—in 2014 McCully co-founded the biotechnology company InfraredRX to help move these technologies to the clinical space. InfraredRX produces an all-in-one, noninvasive device to help measure and guide treatment for PAD—an “early version of the Star Trek tricorder,” as McCully has described it. The company has been awarded grants from the Georgia Research Alliance, as well as over $1.5 million in STTR grant funding from the National Institutes of Health, to develop its product. InfraredRX recently became one of the first tenants of UGA’s Delta Innovation Hub.