Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Folkman wins posthumous MTTC grant

A project led by famous cancer researcher Judah Folkman, who died last month, was among nine research projects awarded funding by the Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center.

The MTTC's sixth round of technology investigation awards totals $360,000 and includes researchers at seven local institutions focusing on new commercial applications of technologies such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, biomedical inventions, and clean energy technology.

The Folkman project grant will go to Children's Hospital Boston. The proposal was submitted by Folkman, who died Jan. 14 of a heart attack. His collaborator, Carmen Barnés, will now be the principal investigator for the project.

The MTTC grants, with a project maximum of $40,000 each, can be used to develop a prototype, gather data for proof of concept, or compare a technology to existing technologies to determine its competitive advantages.

The MTTC said it plans to begin the process for its next round of grants in late spring.

The following projects received $40,000 each in MTTC technology investigation awards:

• Carmen Barnés, Vascular Biology Program, Children's Hospital Boston.

The project is focused on technology research aimed at allowing physicians to pave the way for the development of therapies to prevent complications of prematurity and pre-eclampsia as well as other diseases that impact the health of fetuses.

• Robert Hanson, department of chemistry and chemical biology, Northeastern University.

Hanson's technology, hormonal radio-mammoscintigraphy, represents a nonsurgical method for determining the hormone responsiveness of a breast cancer lesion.

• Paul Yu, Division of Cardiology, Massachusetts General Hospital.

The team is researching calcific vascular disease.

• Vladimir Torchilin, department of pharmaceutical sciences, Northeastern University.

The authors of the project suggest new technology to prepare stable colloidal solution of poorly soluble drugs to increase the bioavailability and effectiveness of these drugs, especially important for cancer chemotherapy.

• T.F. Morse, The Photonics Center, Boston University.

By embedding scintillating nanoparticles in a coherent fiber bundle, the team says it will be possible to increase the sensitivity and resolution of digital X-ray imaging by more than an order of magnitude in one dimension, and three orders of magnitude in three dimensions.

• Louis Goodman, The School For Marine Science and Technology, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

This is a joint collaboration between UMass Dartmouth and Brooke Ocean Technology USA, of New Bedford. The team has developed a low-cost platform for performing ocean measurements. The product combines the advantages of an autonomous underwater vehicle with a vertical profiler.

• Gregory Kowalski, department of mechanical and industrial engineering, Northeastern University, and Dale Larson, bioengineering department, Charles Stark Draper Laboratory.

The project's photonic chip-scale biocalorimeter reduces the amount of compound required by a factor of 1,000 and increases the analytical throughput by a factor of 10. The technology is intended to reduce pharmaceutical drug development costs and risks, and expand calorimetry use into new areas.

• Peter Girguis, organismic and evolutionary biology, Harvard University.

The team will fabricate commercially viable prototypes or microbial power cells for use as power systems in urban and rural settings.

• Jie Song, department of orthopedics, University of Massachusetts Medical School.

The project aims to optimize the surgical deployment strategy and the in vivo resorption and osteointegration of a synthetic bone substitute in rodents using a critical-sized skeletal defect model.