{"id":28769,"date":"2021-08-02T15:09:21","date_gmt":"2021-08-02T19:09:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/research\/?p=28769"},"modified":"2021-08-02T15:16:20","modified_gmt":"2021-08-02T19:16:20","slug":"announcing-the-2021-ignition-award-winners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/research\/2021\/08\/02\/announcing-the-2021-ignition-award-winners\/","title":{"rendered":"Announcing the 2021 Ignition Award Winners"},"content":{"rendered":"

Technology Development is pleased to announce the winners of the 2021 Ignition Award. The Ignition program<\/a> awards $75K and $25K, one-year grants to Boston University faculty to help launch promising new technologies into the marketplace<\/span>.\u00a0 Congratulations to this year’s winners, listed below.<\/p>\n

Members of the BU research community can reach out to Rana K. Gupta<\/a>, Director, Faculty Entrepreneurship, with questions or to learn more about the Ignition program.<\/p>\n

\n

MED TECH<\/h2>\n

The reNEU Propulsion Neuroprosthesis For Gait Restoration After Neurological Injury<\/span><\/h3>\n

Lou Awad, Physical Therapy (Sargent)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Imagine losing control of how your body moves. Now, imagine being able to put on \u2018smart clothing\u2019 that harnesses the power of electricity to bypass neural injury and give you back control. Your life would be renewed. This vision underlies our team\u2019s development of the reNeu propulsion neuroprosthesis\u2014a next generation rehabilitation technology that can augment and rehabilitate the muscles responsible for supporting and propelling the body during walking. In the reNeu, functional textiles integrate electrodes, sensors, and artificial intelligence; the reNeu can sense your movements, understand your intentions, and help you walk as you desire. Moreover, the reNeu can train your nervous system to build stronger connections to your muscles such that one day, you may not need to use this technology anymore.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Progesterone Biosensor<\/span><\/h3>\n

James Galagan, Biomedical Engineering (ENG)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Timing cattle reproduction is critical for farmers to\u00a0deliver animal-sourced products and keep maintenance costs low. However, successfully timing cattle reproduction is difficult. The window to breed is narrow, infrequent, and dictated by changing progesterone levels which can fluctuate or shift. Existing solutions are either too slow, too expensive, not quantitative, or require technical expertise to run. We are working to address this unmet need by developing a progesterone biosensor which is portable, cheap, easy-to-use, has an instantaneous readout, and can provide a quantitative reading from whole blood. Potential customers have stated this technology will fundamentally change their insight into the reproductive state and health of their animals. This information will ultimately allow farmers to improve the\u00a0fertility of their\u00a0herd and save money. BU Ignition Award funding will allow us to advance toward a working prototype which will be the basis for a successful startup.<\/p>\n

\n

Repurposing a Glucometer For The Detection of SARS-CoV-2\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n

Scott Schaus, Chemistry (CAS)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) rapidly became a public health emergency in 213 countries and infecting more than 194 million people worldwide, with the US being especially hard hit. The high infection rates combined with a lack of rapid and facile detection overwhelmed hospitals and clinics as they faced severe infrastructure shortfalls with many doctors and medical health professionals succumbing to the virus. As an alternative to all current detection methods, we propose to repurpose and reenvision glucometer technology to detect SARS-CoV-2.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

PHY SCI<\/h2>\n

MEMS MagnetoGradiometer for High Resolution Measurements<\/span><\/h3>\n

David Bishop, Electrical & Computer Engineering (ENG)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Over 805,000 U.S. citizens suffer heart attacks each year, where 1 in 5 is silent or undetected. Technology trends in portability, miniaturization, and data-driven models are forecasted to prevent these and other events using monitoring and early detection. Our vision is a contactless electrocardiogram based on magnetic methods, which gathers diagnostic information outside of the hospital environment, enabling the early detection necessary to prevent silent heart attacks.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

OPENEYETRACK – A High Speed Eye Tracker For Head-Fixed Applications<\/h3>\n

Chandramouli Chandrasekaran, Anatomy & Neurobiology (CAS)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

We move our eyes to seek information about the world and to make informed decisions. Thus, to understand how the brain works, psychologists and neuroscientists need to monitor the eye movements of observers. openEyeTrack, is a flexible, high-speed research eye tracker being developed by the Chand lab at BU and is targeted at research labs that need to monitor eye movements. Our current prototype of openEyeTrack combines a fast machine vision camera, multithreading, and open source image processing algorithms into a packaged hardware\/software system that can track the eye at 650 frames\/s (compared to 250 frames\/s in low-cost eye trackers). Dr. Chandrasekaran and his team will use the Ignition award from the office of technology development to translate their prototype of 2 openEyeTrack into a usable product, and to compare openEyeTrack\u2019s speed, accuracy, and flexibility to current commercial state-of-the-art eye trackers. The Ignition Award will help the Chand Lab bring openEyeTrack closer to a commercial product that can be made available to the many psychologists and neuroscientists around the world.<\/p>\n

\n

Radiology Interventions Safety, Quality and Complications e-Curriculum<\/h3>\n

Mikhail Higgins, Radiology (BUSM)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

RISQCe (pronounced \u201crisky\u201d) is a highly interactive multimedia self-directed learning curriculum that is being designed to support the formative periprocedural education of Interventional Radiologists (IRs)- to-be across the globe. Through a vibrant instructional design that appeals to diverse IR resident and medical students learners, it aims to teach basic to advanced clinical management, technical pearls and pitfalls, device nuances as well as complication prevention, diagnosis and management. It includes a standardized Quality and Safety curriculum, which is mapped to ACGME milestones that teach sound judgment in clinical decision-making in high pressure scenarios such as clinical conundrums, near- misses, and complications.<\/p>\n

\n

RX<\/h2>\n

Novel NPM-Based Peptide Therapeutic For Acute Kidney Injury<\/span><\/h3>\n

Steven Borkan, Medicine (BUSM)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Acute kidney injury (AKI) affects 78 million people worldwide each year, lacks an effective treatment, and has devastating public health consequences.\u00a0 We discovered that two cell proteins, nucleophosmin (NPM) and Bax, bind to each other during AKI and together, cause cell death and kidney failure.\u00a0 We developed a peptide made of amino acids that prevents NPM and Bax from binding to each other, improves cell survival and kidney function, and also prevents mice from dying in a model of human AKI. BU Ignition support is enabling us to develop a new test to rapidly optimize our peptide as an effective therapeutic for preventing and treating AKI in patients.<\/p>\n

\n

UFD1 Inhibition In The Treatment Of Cancer<\/span><\/h3>\n

Hui Feng, Pharmacology and Medicine (BUSM)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Everyone dreams about magic bulletins that would just kill cancer cells while sparing normal cells. While many are unsure where to find them, our research, which exploits a zebrafish model of cancer, provides clues and pinpoints a protein complex for therapeutic intervention. We found that cancer cells specifically depend on this protein complex for growth and survival. While others seek to target a specific protein inside the complex, our approach is to simply disrupt the formation of this protein complex, leaving each of the protein intact and functional within normal cells. The Ignition Award allows us to collaborate with chemists at Boston University and industrial partners to develop drugs that would specifically disrupt the protein complex and therefore kill cancer cells specifically.<\/p>\n

\n

Small-Molecule Annotation Of Cytokines<\/span><\/h3>\n

Arturo Vegas, Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering (ENG)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Led by the Vegas lab at BU, this collaboration between BU and MIT researchers seeks to create a \u201cchemical fingerprint\u201d for an entire group of proteins that play a pivotal role in autoimmune and inflammatory disease, called cytokines. The researchers are utilizing a technology called small-molecule microarrays that enables them to quickly query 100,000 small molecules for their ability to attach themselves to over 30 different cytokines. A map of this size of what small molecules prefer to attach to which cytokines will provide a fingerprint that will illuminate new chemical strategies for disrupting the role these important proteins play in a number of diseases.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Technology Development is pleased to announce the winners of the 2021 Ignition Award. The Ignition program awards $75K and $25K, one-year grants to Boston University faculty to help launch promising new technologies into the marketplace.\u00a0 Congratulations to this year’s winners, listed below. Members of the BU research community can reach out to Rana K. Gupta, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19169,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[225,247],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28769"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19169"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28769"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28769\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29633,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28769\/revisions\/29633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}