Life Sciences Discovery Fund (LSDF) located in Seattle at www.lsda.org announced awards to go to for-profit and non-profit organizations in Washington State. The awardees will received a total of $1.25 million in “Proof of Concept” grant funding to work to accelerate promising health-related technologies from concept to commercialization.
The funding is going to advance products needed to improve the prevention, diagnosis, or treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, brain cancer, and tooth decay. Funding will also support technology to increase biomedical research productivity and to develop safer drugs.
One of the awards went to the Institute for Systems Biology for $249,924 to develop web-based tools to analyze cancer genetic data to advance understanding of tumor biology, accelerate new discoveries, and in the long term, facilitate personalized therapy.
The “Proof of Concept” grant funding will take place in three cycles. The second cycle for the “Proof of Concept” grants is just starting with pre-proposal awards now open for applications. LSDF’s intent is to distribute $1,000,000 per award cycle. The pre-proposals are due January 3, 2014 with proposal submission for the second cycle due February 12, 2014 with final awards to be made April 21, 2014.
LSDF has a second grant category called Opportunity Grants that has funded $2.4 million to support major research and development initiatives. One of these grants is going to support programs at the Seattle Children’s Research Institute (SCRI) and the University of Washington (UW).
The SCRI award will fund critical studies on a cancer immunotherapy regimen in clinical trials in children and adults to develop a leading immunotherapy program in Seattle. Funding will also support the launch of the Institute for Protein Design and the development and commercialization of medically useful proteins from the laboratory.
In another LSDF announcement, five Washington State organizations received a joint grant to commercialize a trauma-care device. A product development team at UW will receive $390,000 from five organization to foster technology commercialization in the state.
The grant was funded by the Coulter Translational Research Partnership Program at UW, the Institute of Translational Health Sciences, LSDF, the UW Center for Commercialization, and the Washington Research Foundation.
The grant is going to refine and test a handheld device to improve treatments for trauma. Trauma patients often die from excessive bleeding where blood loss can be worsened by a hard-to-diagnose condition called Trauma-Induced Coagulopathy (TIC).
Researchers have developed a tool to rapidly detect TIC and enable the appropriate treatment for this live-threatening condition. The device is able to measure the ability of the blood to clot during trauma which right now can take up to half an hour to detect with current technology. The team has also formed a company called Stasys to license the technology and bring the product to market.
For more information on the device, contact Clare LaFond, UW Center for Commercialization at 206-616-9540 or email clarela@uw.edu.