The winners of the Fall 2020 Duke Incubation Fund awards have been announced. Three projects representing early-stage innovation happening across the University are set to receive funds totaling more than $59,000. Two of the projects are by faculty from the School of Medicine.
The Incubation Fund, run by Duke’s Innovation & Entrepreneurship Initiative (I&E), supports ideas from across Duke with the potential to go to market. A wide range of resources exists at Duke to support research and commercialization, but the Incubation Fund—made possible by a gift from I&E advisory board member Jeffrey Citron and his wife, Suzanne—is among the only opportunities for innovations still in the ideation stage.
Established in 2017, the Fund supports innovation in all schools and departments at Duke. Of the 40 awards made to date totaling more than $677,000, awardees have come from the School of Medicine (16 awards), the Pratt School of Engineering (14), Trinity College of Arts & Sciences (8), the School of Nursing (1), and Centers and Institutes (1).
“One of our main goals at Duke I&E is to lower barriers to innovation and to widen the funnel of people participating in early-stage innovation and technology transfer,” said Sharlini Sankaran, Director of Translational Programs at I&E. “We’ve seen the Incubation Fund help prior cycles’ awardees achieve this goal, and I am confident that the Fall 2020 awardees will leverage the Fund in similarly productive ways.”
The two School of Medicine Incubation Fund awardees for Fall 2020 are:
Jatin Roper, MD (Department of Medicine) | Treatment of Inflammatory Bowel Disease with a Novel Autophagy Inducer
The burden of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is rising, and current treatments for IBD carry significant side effects and aren’t always effective. Autophagy, the cellular process of degrading and recycling cellular components, has been linked to IBD. This team seeks to develop a novel compound that induces autophagy to treat IBD.
Teresa Tarrant, MD (Department of Medicine) | Cellular-Conveyed Phototherapeutics to Treat Arthritis
Current arthritis treatments are not targeted to specific locations and may result in systemic side effects. This team aims to optimize selective laser targeting of a light-activated, red blood cell-mediated drug delivery system to specific joints in order to deploy therapeutics to treat rheumatoid arthritis.
Support from the Fund has proven critical for previous awardees, who have used the funding for purposes including prototyping, business development, market research, and human resources at the pivotal early stages of their projects.
This cycle’s award to Jatin Roper will help him advance his mission of developing a safe, effective, and easy-to-use medication for inflammatory bowel disease by enabling Roper’s team to conduct additional animal studies following effective treatment of IBS in mouse models. Awardee Teresa Tarrant said, “The Incubation Fund will support the next-step, critical experiments that will help answer key questions about how our laser drug delivery system works within the body [to treat arthritis].”
Duke I&E works to make additional connections throughout the Duke innovation system to help leverage the awards’ value for innovators, joining them with mentorship, resources, and programming. Dr. Tarrant and Dr. Roper, both first-time entrepreneurs, participated in this summer’s Department of Medicine Innovators Academy, an eight-week course customized for early career faculty interested in advancing new ideas, interventions, and technologies.
By connecting Incubation Fund awardees and Duke students, I&E also provides both dedicated support for innovators and unique hands-on education for students. This cycle’s award to Marc Deshusses “will allow [his team] to work with Pratt students to develop a novel approach to renewable power production.”
With the Fund now in its sixth funding cycle, numerous previous awardees have gone on to receive follow-on funding from investor groups and federal entrepreneurial programs. A report from a recent survey of prior Incubation Fund awardees shows that a number of recipients have also made other substantial progress towards commercialization, including prototyping, business formation, intellectual property protection, licensing, and product sales. For example, Spring 2018 awardees Marybeth Tetlow, Duke Health nurse, and Ryan Shaw, Associate Professor in the School of Nursing, have made significant progress commercializing solutions to manage intravenous lines with Line Snugglers.
Applications for the Incubation Fund’s Spring 2021 cycle will open in early February.
For all three recipients, see the article at the Duke Innovation & Enterpreneurship blog