Jie Song, PhD, was awarded a $25,000 grant from the UMass Commercial Ventures and Intellectual Property Technology Development Fund for her FlexBone research.
UMass President Jack M. Wilson announced $200,000 in grants to UMass researchers, including two individual researchers at UMass Chan and two teams comprising faculty from the Worcester and Lowell campuses.
The awards are made annually from the University’s Commercial Ventures and Intellectual Property (CVIP) Technology Development Fund. President Wilson established this fund in 2004 and to date has awarded more than $1.3 million in grants to university researchers on all five campuses. The fund was created and is maintained through reinvestment of a small portion of licensing revenues plus a contribution from the president’s office. The fund is managed by William Rosenberg, executive director of CVIP.
Eight awards of $25,000 each are being made to faculty members from the Amherst, Lowell and Worcester campuses. Revenues from the licensing of UMass technologies exceeded $40 million in fiscal year 2010 and over the last 15 years, licensing income has totaled $450 million, making UMass among the nation’s technology transfer leaders. The previously funded technologies have been the basis of four new companies (Anellotech, Dartmouth Medical Research, Reflectance Medical and Wesfolk) and have resulted in a number of licenses to existing companies plus several million dollars in additional research funding.
“This program has aided UMass scientists in their quest to translate today’s breakthrough into tomorrow’s new product and medical treatments,” Wilson said. “It has also helped to establish and maintain our status as one of the leading technology transfer universities in the nation. In awarding these grants, we are seeding innovation and seeding the future.”
The awards are directed at advancing the commercial development of leading-edge technologies discovered in laboratories on UMass campuses to make them more attractive to industry and more likely to be commercialized.
Applications were graded on technical merit, stage of technology, cost to complete development, commercial potential and business viability, probability of commercial success, and the ability to execute the business plan. The technologies represent a broad range of disciplines and were selected as the leading examples from among dozens of submissions for support from the fund.
The 2011 CVIP Technology Development Fund awards were given to the following projects that involve UMass Chan faculty:
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Uri Galili, PhD, professor of surgery and medicine, for “Regeneration of Ischemic Myocardium Using Alpha-gal Nanoparticles”
One of the leading causes of death and a major cause of hospital admission in western countries, myocardial ischaemia, commonly referred to as a heart attack, is the result of a reduction in blood supply to the heart muscle, usually due to coronary artery disease. This loss of oxygen-rich blood leads to localized damage where heart muscle has died and is unable to regenerate. Using a substance called alpha-gal nanoparticles, scientists hope to jump start muscle tissue regeneration. By injecting the substance into injured heart tissue, scientists believe it may be possible to reverse heart damage suffered during a heart attack. The CVIP funding will enable researchers to determine the efficacy of alpha-g
