B-BIC Grant Opportunity

May 14, 2014 at 12:40 am

The Boston Biomedical Innovation Center (B-BIC) is now accepting applications for PILOT and DRIVE grants, which support research and development of innovative devices, diagnostics, as well as therapeutics related to heart, lung, blood, and sleep. PILOT grants provide up to $50,000 for direct costs for one year, while DRIVE grants provide up to $200,000 for milestone achievements over 1½ to two years. Applicants are requested to contact their institutional site miner prior to submitting their application.

B-BIC is a grouping of academic centers, government, venture capital, non-profit organizations, and industry designed to accelerate translational research and the development of solutions that will have health, economic, and societal impact. B-BIC is one of three National Centers for Accelerated Innovations (NCAI) selected by the National Institution of Health to address the gap between discovery and invention, and commercialization.

PILOT grants support collaborative research projects that are in the early stages of pre-commercialization. This grant provides up to $50,000 for tasks that support proof of concept. That is, reproducibility experiments, testing of key elements, or early prototype development.

DRIVE grants provide investments in early-stage technologies for completion of activities that help demonstrate proof of value. This grant provides up to $200,000 for system level testing or complete prototype development. DRIVE projects also receive mentoring from a team of experts.

Both of these grants have an open call for applications; pre-proposals may be submitted at any time. For additional information please visit B-BIC.org

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TDRR Unplugged 2014

May 14, 2014 at 12:37 am

The Office of Technology Development (OTD) is always working on creative ways to connect our research faculty with entrepreneurs and industry representatives. On February 26, Metcalf Trustee Ballroom in the School of Management played host to the third annual “Tech, Drugs, and Rock n’ Roll Unplugged” for over 70 attendees. BU’s Office of Technology Development organized the event, in a joint collaboration with the Boston University’s Chapter of the National Academy of Inventors. The event was designed as a networking and informational event to recognize the valuable contribution of BU’s innovative and entrepreneurial faculty.

Renuka Babu, Executive Director Accelerator Programs & New Ventures, moderated a panel discussion on “New and Alternative Perspectives of Funding Approaches”.  A distinguished panel of speakers was assembled from Boston University and Spinethera. In addition, TDRR Unplugged also featured various programs supported by The Office of Technology Development, Boston University’s Chapter of the National Academy of Inventors, and The Coulter Translational Partnership in Biomedical Engineering.

Boston University’s very own co-ed a cappella group, The Treblemakers, brought in a range of entertainment for the evening. Their one-hour set performance from 4:30 to 5:30 included the songs “Cry Me a River” by Justin Timberlake, “Never Let Me Go” by Florence and The Machine, “Eet” by Regina Spektor, and “Bills Bills Bills” by Destiny’s Child to name just a few. Refreshments and hors d’oeuvres from Catering on the Charles, and entertainment from the Treblemakers stimulated the audience into networking with fellow Boston University faculty and members of the local entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Our “Tech, Drugs, and Rock n’ Roll Unplugged” event was a great showcase of what is to come this summer, July 15th, in our larger-scale “TDRR” event. We hope to intertwine the same themes of networking and enjoyment this summer with our fifth annual run of “Tech, Drugs, and Rock n’ Roll.” For more information about this summer’s event, please feel free to check out our website at www.bu.edu/otd/news/tdrr.

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Ignition Awardees 2014

May 14, 2014 at 12:34 am

The Office of Technology Development has completed its annual Ignition Award cycle and is pleased to announce this year’s winners.  Ignition Awards are typically $50K, one year grants to validate early-stage technologies in the Life Sciences/High Tech domain with clear potential commercial and medical impact.  Between leading outreach through BU community to better advertise and solicit proposals and bringing on notable industry and investment figures to make award decisions through the Ignition Committee, Ignition awardees are seeing increasing success in finding follow-on funding.

This year, OTD has awarded Ignition grants to four technologies:

  • George Daaboul will use his award to reach proof-of-concept milestones for his new system for digital detection of single molecules, testing a potential way to significantly increase optical resolution and comparing the performance of his prototype to existing technologies.
  • Russell Giordano will be using his award to fabricate a new test line of his bullet-resistant ceramic composite, measuring their strength and flexibility and supplying samples for interested partners.
  • Michael Holick’s award will be used in a pilot study of his new vitamin-D producing LED, which could cheaply and easily treat vitamin deficiency.
  • John Caradonna will use his award to optimize the production of chemical catalysts for his green oxidation system, which has the potential to significantly change the pharmaceutical manufacturing process.

Of last year’s winners, with help from OTD and their Kindle Mentors, three are already in advanced discussions for investment or research partnerships with industry, and all of our Ignition Winners over the last three years are still actively developing, seeking funding, or have successfully licensed or found investors.  OTD looks forward to the continued success of past and present Ignition Awardees, and is excited to bring a new group of inventors into the program next year, with the application process for 2015 awards starting in the fall.

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Celebrating Our Kindle Mentors

May 14, 2014 at 12:29 am

In the last two years, the Boston University Office of Technology Development has significantly grown its Kindle Mentoring Program to increase the engagement of successful BU alums and the greater Boston entrepreneurial community with the New Ventures process.  Boston University and BMC together represent more than $400 million in research awards and support a research community of more than 3,900 faculty and 32,000 students, and the Kindle program provides a unique opportunity for seasoned entrepreneurs and business executives to have direct and meaningful interaction with the BU community to facilitate early stage business formation.

Our Kindle Mentors are seasoned entrepreneurs and business executives from a variety of industries and business occupations, who volunteer to work individually or in groups with their chosen mentee projects.  Through this engagement, they have opportunity to network with other mentors via regular meetings, needing to commit only a few hours a month.  All mentors agree to adhere to a strict code of conduct, consistent with the university’s mission, to ensure that the mentees receive objective counsel.

The BU Kindle Program brought has brought on over 80 new mentors since 2011, with over 65 currently active.  At a recent meeting, OTD thanked several outstanding mentors for their service, including Joe Caruso (Owner, Bantam Group), Matt Crowley, (CEO, Sonify and former OTD Director), Ed Berger (Founder, Larchmont Strategic Advisors), Ian Mashiter (Entrepreneurial Educator, BUSM), Steven Saunders (Patent Attorney and Angel Investor), Terry Russell (Managing Director of Interface Ventures and serial entrepreneur), and Joe Straight (former CEO, Verax, ZymeQuest).  We look forward to seeing the results of their continued efforts.

If interested in being a mentor, please register here:

http://www.bu.edu/otd/industry-investors-entrepreneurs/kindle-mentoring-program/

Untitled

OTD Director Vinit Nijhawan (center) and Michael Pratt (second from left) thank:  Ed Berger, Matt Crowley, Steven Saunders, Terry Russell, Joe Straight, Ian Mashiter, and Joe Caruso (not pictured) at February’s Kindle Mentor meeting.

 

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Healthcare Startup Constant Therapy Raises First Round Funding to Continue Developing, Launching Mobile Brain Rehabilitation Solutions

February 24, 2014 at 4:35 pm

Adoption of its iPad Solutions Growing 50% Month-Over-Month; Now Employed by Thousands of Registered Clients and Therapists

BOSTON – Feb. 24, 2014 – Constant Therapy, a developer of a cloud-based iPad solution that enables people with cognitive, language, communication and learning disorders to access science-based brain therapies, today announced that it has raised first round funding.

This funding round is led by Boston University, TiE Angels Boston and serial entrepreneur Andy Palmer.
The undisclosed amount will go towards the development of Constant Therapy’s ground-breaking mobile brain rehabilitation iPad solution to meet the demands of a rapidly expanding user base as well as to officially launch and expand marketing efforts. The company’s solutions are designed for use by victims of traumatic brain injury, stroke, aphasia and learning disabled clients in addition to speech and language pathologists/occupational therapists.

According to Constant Therapy co-founder and CEO Veera Anantha, “Constant Therapy is the only application combining science-based tasks with advanced analytics enabling patients to take advantage of the latest and most advanced research on brain rehabilitation. Adoption of our application has been growing 50% month-over-month, reaching new milestones with thousands of registered users. This funding will enable us to better and more quickly meet their critical needs.”

Vinit Nijhawan, managing director of Boston University Office of Technology Development, said, "We are proud to support a solution based on advanced brain rehabilitation research performed here. More importantly, we believe the Constant Therapy solution has the potential to transform the way therapy and developmental care is delivered to brain injury survivors and children with learning disorders."

According to Andy Palmer, “There are few early-stage companies that have the potential to both create economic value and change people lives in such a significant way – Constant Therapy is one of them. The strong demand for the Constant Therapy application serves as testimony to the critical need it fills and the efficacy of its development.”

Constant Therapy enables patients to access tools for high-quality, science-based therapies from anywhere and at anytime. Clinicians can create highly customized rehabilitation programs for each patient, assign homework and monitor patient performance 24x7. This can translate into better patient outcomes and, importantly, continuing improvement.

Free Trial Download and Video Demo

Patients and clinicians can download a free trial of Constant Therapy’s iPad application here. They can view short video demos of the product here.

About Boston University

Founded in 1839, Boston University is an internationally recognized institution of higher education and research. With more than 33,000 students, it is the fourth-largest independent university in the United States. BU consists of 16 schools and colleges, along with a number of multi-disciplinary centers and institutes integral to the University’s research and teaching mission. In 2012, BU joined the Association of American Universities (AAU), a consortium of 62 leading research universities in the United States and Canada.

About Constant Therapy (www.constanttherapy.com)

Founded in 2012, Boston-based Constant Therapy provides iPad tools for continuous and personalized therapy to people with cognitive, language, communication and learning disorders. Born out of groundbreaking research at Boston University and in pilots with prominent and nationally recognized rehabilitation institutions, Constant Therapy provides the most comprehensive set of tools for care to people who have suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI), stroke or dementia, or children who need special education and care due to learning disabilities or other disorders. Therapy tasks are based on the latest research and are easy to use. With 50 science-based categories of tasks and over 12,000 items, patients can continue to get better at home or even after traditional care ends in the clinic.

CONTACT:
Elyse Familant
GCC, Inc.
978-725-3637
elysef@gccpr.com

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Message from the Managing Director

October 11, 2013 at 12:31 pm

Vinit Nijhawan October 2013

United States has been a leader in research and development funding since the end of WWII. Only Japan has outspent the U.S. as a percentage of GDP, with Japanese industry outspending all other countries. The U.S. government has outspent other countries in R&D spending (see figure below). Next to the Department of Defense, the National Institute of Health (NIH) has garnered the lion share of that spending. As a result U.S. BioPharma is a world leader in patents filed and new products brought to the market. Massachusetts has been a disproportionate recipient of NIH funding with the leading Biotech Cluster in the world.

The federal government sequestration is impacting basic research funding at all research universities including Boston University.  Industry sponsored research has the potential to support faculty research and to enhance product pipeline for companies. Global industry R&D expenditure have held steady at approximately 1.25% of sales (see figure below).

Of the top 20 innovator companies (by R&D spending) globally in 2011, 8 were pharmaceutical companies who typically spend on average 15% of sales. In spite of this R&D spending pharma lacks a robust pipeline of new drugs or related products. In fact the industry has been and continues to face patent cliffs as blockbuster drugs such as Lipitor and Enbrel lose their monopoly. Additionally the role of early stage biotech VCs has diminished with the cooled IPO market. Pharma is increasingly stepping up with in-house venture capital and increasing support of university research.

BU has recently been significantly supported by Pfizer CTI, Johnson and Johnson and Takeda who have sponsored research funding for novel therapeutics and diagnostics.  BU is a great university to partner with and we are working to streamline our industry sponsored research process to “minimize friction” and make it even easier for industry to collaborate with us.

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Announcements

October 11, 2013 at 12:20 pm

November 19th 2013, Grow Innovation at Biotech Event

As Boston’s largest biotech networking event, BiotechTuesday has been connecting professionals for over eleven years.  On November 19th, we are hosting our Grow Innovation in Biotech event to reward innovative ideas in biotech.  If you have an innovative biotech product or idea, please submit a pitch to our site for review by the community (http://goo.gl/GMIHkW).   Participants will have an opportunity to win awards and support from the BiotechTuesday community.  Be sure to register to attend this exciting event at http://goo.gl/14NhZo and select the Apply to Join link if you are not already a member of BiotechTuesday.

Sample6 Secures 11 Million

Sample6, a company focused on applying biotechnology to advance food safety, announced today that it has secured a $11 million Series B financing round led by Canaan Partners.

For more information please visit:
http://sample6.com/2013/10/09/sample6-secures-11-million-in-series-b-financing-to-support-commercialization-of-companys-food-safety-products/

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New Life Sciences and Engineering Center Promotes Synthetic Biology Research

October 11, 2013 at 12:14 pm

Boston University has recently proposed building a seven-story, 150,000-square-foot life sciences and engineering building to house a new center focused on synthetic biology research, as an addition to its Charles River campus. Named ‘The Center for Integrated Life Sciences and Engineering’, the building will replace an existing parking lot on 610 Commonwealth Avenue that is currently owned by BU. The university filed plans for the new facility with the City of Boston just last month, stating it would “provide additional interdisciplinary research space for faculty and students in neuroscience and systems/synthetic biology” in order to “to keep pace with the burgeoning bioengineering industry.”

The center's main seven floors will provide lab and collaboration areas, as well as academic and administrative space.  In addition, a mechanical penthouse will be located on the top floor housing machinery needed to support the center’s research programs. In the last few years, as computing power has multiplied and the cost of decoding and synthesizing DNA has nose-dived, the promise of synthetic biological to solve important problems has never been greater. For example, research on oil spill cleanup is high on the agenda and will employ customized microbes. Another project on weapons detection will use synthetic biology to create programmable robots, and has received $7.5 million funding from the Office of Naval Research.

The program intends to create a dynamic trio of humans, robots, and genetically engineered bacteria, working together to detect whatever the bacteria are programmed to detect. The customized bacteria will talk to one another, and they will report to miniature “chaperone robots,” a mere 10 to 100 centimeters long, that will each control thousands of microbes. Finally, the chaperone robots will wirelessly report back to humans.

James Collins, a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and pioneer in synthetic biology and Calin Belta, an ENG associate professor of mechanical engineering, systems engineering, and bioinformatics, are the two BU faculty working on the project. The Collins group will determine the DNA modifications required to engineer bacteria while Belta will help design and assemble both the microbiotic and chaperone robots.

Douglas Densmore, the Richard and Minda Reidy Family Career Development Assistant Professor in the College of Electrical and Computer Engineering, will find the best way to assemble and verify the DNA used to enable the microbes to sense specific environmental signals. “The idea,” says Densmore, “is to engineer living organisms—in this case bacteria—that respond to external stimuli in the environment. They will generate a fluorescent or chemical signal that can be measured by the chaperone robots, which can produce signals as well that the bacteria can detect. So you have a two-way communication system. And finally, we will create chaperone robots that can also communicate with human users.”

“There is a group of biologists out there who say, ‘Biology is way too complicated to engineer,’” Densmore says. “Biology is complicated, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to push the boundaries. We are saying, ‘Let’s not wait. We are going to learn things and we are going to predict things and we are going to build things.’”

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Boston University’s Effort to Fight Cancer by Teaming Doctors with Engineers

October 11, 2013 at 12:12 pm

Imagine if a clinician had the tools to reveal the early stages of lung cancer through just a nose swab, detect liver and skin cancer with a simple blood test, or prescreen for colon cancer without the need for a colonoscopy.

These are some of the goals of the research projects that are supported by the Center for Future Technologies in Cancer Care (CFTCC) at Boston University. The CFTCC was founded in July 2012 with help from a five-year, $9 million grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) at the National Institutes of Health. The Center’s mission is to move some of the burden of cancer treatment, screening and diagnosis out of specialized centers and into local clinics or home care use around the world. The driving notion is to bring tests conveniently to the patient that provide immediate results to improve patient outcomes and lower healthcare costs. The focus on point-of-care treatment stems largely from patients having to travel a distance or take time off of work to see a specialist, which can result in delays in care and follow-up treatment. Additionally, in low resource settings, there may not be enough well-trained surgeons or other specialists to treat all patients in need.

To address these issues, the CFTCC evaluates new technologies at various stages of development for their suitability across a range of primary care and non-traditional healthcare settings. Future technologies seek to allow providers who have less specialized training to treat more patients at lower cost. The Center focuses on the identification, prototyping, and early clinical assessment of innovative point-of-care technologies for the treatment, screening, diagnosis and monitoring of cancers with the overall goal of transitioning functional prototypes out of the Center toward later stage clinical testing and commercialization.

A major aspect of this effort is to promote research collaborations between engineers, clinicians and industry partners. The CFTCC fosters collaborations between these stakeholders and offers a variety of additional support to the teams. The Center is comprised of different Cores which are available to qualified Center Projects. The Prototype Development and Testing Core consists of the Alpha Core and Beta Core prototyping labs on the Boston University campus. The Alpha Core provides scientific expertise and manufacturing resources that enable researchers to build rapid prototypes of their devices. The Beta Core, in collaboration with the Boston University-Fraunhofer Alliance, provides scaled-up production and advises on the suitability of mass production. The Training Core offers workshops and meet-ups that bring a broad range of stakeholders together in settings where cross-fertilization of ideas can be facilitated. Several seminars that are open to the public are held throughout the year to train people in topics including regulatory issues, good manufacturing practices, and working with institutional review boards. The Clinical Needs Assessment and Impact Analysis Core identifies unmet medical needs perceived by clinicians, patients and the medical device industry.

Catherine Klapperich, the CFTCC director and an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, encourages anyone to seek advice and/or apply for support from the Center. The only requirement is that the project is related to cancer care. More information for the center can be found at www.bu.edu/ftcc/.

 

 

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MRC Technology and Boston University Collaborate to Develop anti-IL-16 Antibody for Treatment of Inflammatory Conditions

October 11, 2013 at 12:11 pm

Boston University is collaborating with MRC Technology, a technology transfer organization, to develop an anti-IL-16 antibody for use in treatment of inflammatory diseases and Ischemic Reperfusion Injury (IRI). A £577,000 Biomedical Catalyst Award grant to MRC Technology in 2012 will partly fund the project.

The new antibody therapy may have promise for a wide range of inflammatory diseases, including Crohn’s Disease, Lupus, asthma, as well as in IRI. IRI is a disease resulting from tissue damage and ensuing inflammatory response due to sudden loss of blood flow, which may occur during surgery or as a result of a blood clot. In the past, this has caused poor clinical outcomes and extended hospital stays for patients, and represents a large healthcare burden.

The antibody was originally developed by Boston University and has been humanized by MRC Technology. The MRC Technology team is now in the process of performing further engineering, as well as detailed x-ray diffraction structural analysis to better understand IL-16 functionality . In the meantime, Boston University is conducting both in vivo and in vitro experiments to confirm its validity.

Professor Justin Bryans, Director of Drug Discovery at MRC Technology said: “The general anti-inflammatory field is a large market, and IL-16 has the potential to cover a broad range of indications. We are very pleased that Boston University chose to work with MRC Technology.”

“MRC Technology has been very supportive and a real pleasure to work with. The group’s scientists were able to humanize the antibody very efficiently, and we are in the process of characterizing its efficacy in vitro and in vivo.” Commented Bill Cruikshank, Professor of Medicine at Boston University. “We look forward to collaborating further on this project.”

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