The Ignition Award Program awards funds to Boston University faculty to bridge the gap between government-funded, discovery-oriented research and the follow-on development work performed by external commercial or non-profit entities. By enabling researchers to generate relevant data, reach key milestones, develop a prototype, or test an implementation strategy the Ignition Awards will help bring raw technology and business concepts to a mature enough state where they can be either licensed, form the basis of a new company, or create a new, non-profit social enterprise.

Two awards apiece focused on healthcare and clean energy. The Ignition Award winners are as follows:

1) Preclinical validation of anti-hDEspR Mab-Rxtic* prototype: in vivo efficacy

PI: Victoria L.M. Herrera, MD; Professor of Medicine, Director of Ultrasound Micro-imaging Core; Department of Medicine, Whitaker Cardiovascular Institute, BUMC

Co-PI: Nelson Ruiz-Opazo, PhD., Department of Medicine, Whitaker Cardiovascular Institute, BUMC

2) Large Scale Rapid Response Energy Storage and Electrical Energy Generation System

PI: Uday B. Pal, Profesor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Boston University

Co-PI: Srikanth Gopalan, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Boston University

Co-PI: Soumendra Basu, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Boston University

3) Expressing Mammalian fat-storing genes to generate genetically-engineered plants for biofuel/ oil production

PI: Vishwajeet Puri, PhD., Department of Medicine, Section of Endicrinology, Diabetes, and Nutrition, Boston University School of Medicine

4) A Molecular Diagnostic for Thyroid Cancer using a novel miRNA/ Microfluidics Platform

PI: Maurizio Cattaneo, PhD.

Co-PI: Dr. Catherine Klapperich, Associate Professor, BME

Co-PI: Dr. Jennifer Rosen, Associate Professor, MED

The Office of Technology Development works with a committee of faculty, students, senior venture capitalists, industry representatives, foundations and entrepreneurs to review the feasibility and impact of the proposed project and select award recipients.  After receiving the awards, OTD will monitor awardees’ progress and provide strategic business support to help maximize the potential for follow-on funding from the appropriate developmental sources.

NobleGen Biosciences holds exclusive license from Harvard and BU to commercialize breakthrough fourth-generation nanopore sequencing technology. Boston University Professor Amit Meller, an internationally recognized leader in nanopore physics, developed the technology. He has won $8.5 million in NIH funding since 2002. NobleGen is run by Meller and CEO Frank Feist and operates out of UMass Boston’s Venture Development Center.

NobleGen’s technology is designed to be 100x faster than the best projected performance of 3^rd generation sequencing. For more information contact Sean Lee (seanlee@bu.edu).

OTD Managing Director Vinit Nijhawan

Dear Reader,

The Office of Technology Development is accelerating BU spin-offs by investing in infrastructure elements: the Kindle mentoring program, Ignition Grants for faculty and Launch Award convertible debt funding and Business Incubation.

In 2010 we funded 11 Ignition grants ($500K), two Launch Awards ($350K) and currently have 86 mentors and 49 mentee projects being mentored. We have 15 companies in the incubator (including Good Start Genetics who just raised $18M). Furthermore we are creating a co-working space in the incubator with 10 desks available for individual entrepreneurs.

We have spun-off 21 companies who have either raised funding or are about to raise funding (see table below).  Please contact us if you are interested in learning more about any of these projects.

Have a safe and happy holiday season.

Sincerely,

Vinit Nijhawan, OTD Managing Director

Robots harvesting the tobacco plants

Akin to an industrial or automated manufacturing process, robotically-tended machines plant seeds, tend to growing plants, add genetic specifications, and harvest the plants upon maturity. The weeks-long process is short compared to traditional methods of vaccine production which can take several months.

More coverage on this story in BUToday and Engineer Magazine

Check out the article and video (originally published in BU Today) below.

BU Today- Every day, our world grows more digital and more of our lives migrates to an electronic format. But Margrit Betke, a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of computer science, believes the networked world isn’t nearly as inclusive as it ought to be.

“The community of people with severe disabilities is not really well served by computer science,” Betke says. “Many people impaired by diseases like multiple sclerosis or ALS cant type Google searches. They cant play video games, and they cant click on a friend’s e-mail.”

So, in collaboration with James Gips, a Boston College professor of computer science, and several of her students, Betke has spent the last eight years developing a camera mouse that greatly expands accessibility to the digital world. The camera mouse software uses a computer webcam to lock onto and track a chosen section of the users face — a nostril or the tip of an eyebrow, for example — and then links that persons head movement to a cursor on the screen. Move right and the cursor goes right. Move left and it reverses direction. Pause for several seconds over a link and it clicks.

Betke and her fellow researchers have adapted a camera mouse to work with several popular programs, such as Microsoft Word. They’ve also created custom software that allows computer users with disabilities to type e-mails, edit photographs, create music, and fight space aliens, among other activities.

In spring 2007, after a failed attempt to build a company around the new technology, Betke and Gips decided to give camera mouse away online. These days, about 2,500 people download it every month. The researchers get frequent e-mails from people as far away as Australia and Uzbekistan, thanking them and asking for technical assistance.

“With software, there’s always an issue of maintenance,” says Betke. Requests to fix a software bug or make camera mouse compatible with the latest operating system always get highest priority. A request for a camera mouse version of Flight Simulator, on the other hand, becomes a candidate for a class project. Betke’s students also work as volunteers in places like the Boston Home, a nursing care center for adults with neurodegenerative diseases, whose residents have used camera mouse.

What’s next? Betke hopes to make camera mouse more adaptable to the wide range of mobility limitations, arranging navigation buttons to match a persons most controlled range of motion, for example, or accommodating the slow diminishment of a user’s skills.

“It’s a challenge that is facing all human-computer interface research,” says Betke. “We can adapt our own system with user profiles and all that, but to actually have the computer figure it out for us and help us along is a very different story.”

Welcome to Terrier Tech, a blog about technology, research and innovation at BU, from the Office of Technology Development at Boston University.

We’re using this blog not only to disseminate information, but more importantly, to highlight amazing and sometimes previously unrecognized research and technology developments at the university and through the individual work of faculty and students.

The Office of Technology Development provides a service to the Boston University community- faculty, students, alumni- the translation of their ideas into useful products and services. We provide this service through patent filing, licensing, mentorship, funding, and business incubation.

Thanks for checking us out! Comment, share with friends, and give us feedback.

-OTD at BU