Entrepreneurship is alive and well at Brandeis.
Last week, fourteen teams of Brandeis scientists presented their research to a panel of industry experts to compete for funding from the Brandeis University Virtual Incubator Sprout Grant Program. The Virtual Incubator seeks to nurture and support entrepreneurial scientists at Brandeis by providing education, mentoring, networking and seed grants to help move their discoveries from the laboratory to the market.
Judges were impressed by the team presentations. The teams ranged from biologists who have projects that could be ready for licensing as early as next year, to computer science / IT entrepreneurship students with a web application that already has 1200 users.
“We were overwhelmed by the phenomenal proposals we received” says Irene Abrams, Associate Provost for Innovation. “The response was incredible – with only a few weeks notice, 23 teams applied for Sprout Grants and 14 presented their proposals to the panel of judges. I was impressed by the level of creativity among the applicants, and by the hard work the teams put into the presentations. We only had $50,000, so we had to turn down many excellent applications, which we would have funded if we had more money.”
The 2011 winning projects are:
- Generation Of A Rapid And Efficient Protein Knockout System, Lead Scientist: Erin Jonasson (with Satoshi Yoshida)
- Identification Of Molecules For Stabilizing DJ-1, A Protein Involved In Parkinson And Alzheimer Diseases. Lead Scientist: Joey Salisbury (with Brian Williams, Ala Nassar, Jeff Agar and Greg Petsko)
- Targeting Oncogenic Ras For Protein Degradation, A Novel Approach To Therapy. Lead Scientist: Rory Coffey (with Marcus Long, Ruibao Ren, and Liz Hedstrom)
- Identifying Pharmacological Chaperones that Promote Survival in Mouse Models of ALS, Lead Scientist: Jared Auclair (with Joey Salisbury, Dagmar Ringe, Greg Petsko, and Jeff Agar)
- A Novel, Low Cost, Highly Sensitive Form Of Suppression PCR, Lead Scientist: Ken Sugino (with Sean O’Toole and Sacha Nelson)
- Zen.Do, Team: Bill DeRusha, Joshua Silverman, Jason Urton (Computer Science)
see also: Brandeis NOW
