The University of Chicago’s Innovation Fund has just announced plans to invest more than half a million in three ventures working to improve healthcare and agriculture through innovation. So far, the Fund has infused more than $3.6 million in 38 ventures with high potential for societal and commercial impact.
In December, more than 100 people gathered at the Chicago Innovation Exchange http://cie.uchicago.edu to learn about the new technology being developed by researchers at the university’s affiliated laboratories.
“The Innovation Fund in combination with a multitude of other resources available at the university helps support entrepreneurs in taking their next step to explore the path to commercialization,” said John Flavin, Executive Director of the Exchange.
The Innovation Fund is managed in partnership with UChicagoTech and the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Twice a year, the Fund extends a call for proposals to teams from UChicago, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and the Marine Biological Laboratory to consider commercializing their technologies.
Several projects were recently chosen from two companies involved in the health and medical field. One company Navipoint Genomics, LLC http://navipointgenomics.com was awarded $175,000 to support the development of the team’s advanced genomics analysis platform.
The platform allows the transfer and analysis of full human genomes fifty to 100 times faster than competitive solutions and can speed up the time for large scale analysis from months to days. Team members from the Computation Institute and Argonne plan to use the funding to build a full proof-of-concept that will be HIPAA compliant for use in clinical practice.
Another company RiMO Therapeutics www.rimorx.com received $250,000 to study their proprietary high precision cancer treatment in humans. This solution using nanotechnology to deliver low dose X-ray treatment is effective in eradicating solid tumors. The team plans to complete their pre-clinical studies and launch the first-in-human study by this summer.
The company has also executed the first “UCGo!” http://ucgo.uchicago.edu Startup License with the university. This license is an optional standardized license agreement created last year to increase entrepreneurship at the university.