Wednesday, October 8, 2008

MIT’s Deshpande Center awards research grants

By Mass High Tech Staff

The Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation has awarded $700,000 worth of grants to MIT research teams. The awards went to researchers working on projects including disease therapies, allergy diagnosis, HIV care in the developing world, drug discovery, energy efficient displays, energy storage and nanoscale imaging.

The Deshpande Center grants are awarded each spring and fall, and they fund proof-of-concept explorations and validation for emerging technologies. The following researchers received grants:

• Utkan Demirci and Martha Gray, for a disposable CD-4 T lymphocyte-counting microchip intended to provide fast, cost-effective on-site HIV virus monitoring to improve patient care in the developing world (Renewal from fall 2007 grant round).

• Gerald Fink, for a compound intended to stimulate a more powerful immune response to specific monoclonal antibodies, potentially enabling development of effective new disease therapies (renewal from fall 2007 grant round).

• Karen Gleason, for long-lived LEDs on flexible substrates providing energy-efficient portable displays.

• Rohit Karnik and Jeffrey Karp, for a device for separating cells that could be used for the monitoring and diagnosis of a wide variety of diseases.

• Susan Lindquist, for the development of novel therapeutic strategies to combat difficult-to-treat bacterial biofilm infections (renewal from spring 2008 grant round).

• J. Christopher Love, for an in-vitro test that will improve the accuracy of assessing responses to allergens, and will enable long-term monitoring of allergies and desensitizing therapies.

• Donald Sadoway, for a proof-of-concept for a novel battery using a supervalent technology to move energy density beyond the limitations of lithium-ion batteries.

• Henry I. Smith and Rajesh Menon, for an absorbance modulation technique enabling economical high-resolution, high-throughput, nanoscale imaging for faster, more flexible analysis of nano-structures (renewal from fall 2007 grant round.)

• Graham Walker, for a project to attempt to isolate lead compounds to develop a new antibiotic.