Eight Winners Enter Innovation Pipeline That Has Produced
Three Commercial Technologies in Two Years
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Oct. 25 /PRNewswire/ -- The Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation today announced
it issued eight grants -- five new projects and three renewals -- totaling
$669,000 from a pool of 34 applicants in its fall round of proposals. The
grants, awarded to MIT faculty in the School of Engineering, will fund
development of innovations ranging from a new method of early cancer detection
to a breakthrough in the cost of manufacturing fuel cells.
In only two years since it was launched with the mission to bridge the gap
between laboratory research at MIT and the marketplace, the Deshpande Center
has funded 38 projects, with two of the first four Innovation Grant recipients
spun out as new, venture-capital-backed companies and another project licensed
for commercial use. The Center helps researchers bring their ideas to
fruition by supporting market-driven innovation, assisting with the
intellectual property process, and enabling collaboration throughout the R&D
phase. Additionally, a Deshpande Center Catalyst program facilitates market
input from a network of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists recruited by the
Center to help advance the innovations to commercialization.
The early Deshpande grant winners that benefited from such transitional
support and subsequently launched new commercial ventures are Brontes
Technologies, a 3-D imaging company in Woburn, MA, and Pervasis Therapeutics,
a medical device technology company in Cambridge, MA. Another Deshpande
team's memory cell technology was licensed to a nanotechnology company.
Several other start-ups are in the works; one of them, recently incorporated
as Myomo, won the grand prize in the MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition in
2004.
The grant winners are:
-- Lionel Kimerling and Anuradha Murthy Agarwal: Low-cost multispectral
infrared detector arrays
-- John Brisson: Novel ice-cream production method
-- Chiping Chen: Making 3G and 4G a reality with low-cost amplifiers for
wireless base stations
-- Clark Colton: Finding early-stage cancers using novel contrast agents
for enhanced MRI
-- Martin Culpepper: HexFlex: Enabling nanofabrication with a six-axis
nanomanipulator
-- Klavs Jensen: Accelerating innovation in the chemistry lab with
integrated automated microchemical systems
-- Yang Shao-Horn: Engineered electrode assemblies for PEM fuel cells
-- Michael Stonebraker: Hybrid DBMS optimized for read-intensive
applications
For additional information on these grants or the Deshpande Center in
general, please visit http://web.mit.edu/deshpandecenter
About the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation
The Deshpande Center is part of the MIT School of Engineering and was
established in 2002 through an initial $20M gift from Jaishree Deshpande and
Desh Deshpande, the co-founder and chairman of Sycamore Networks. The
Deshpande Center supports a wide range of emerging technologies and serves as
a catalyst for innovation and entrepreneurship by supporting leading-edge
research and bridging the gap between the laboratory and the marketplace.
Krisztina Holly
Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation
617-253-0943
zholly@mit.edu
http://web.mit.edu/deshpandecenter
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SOURCE MIT
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CONTACT:
Krisztina Holly of Deshpande Center for
Technological Innovation, +1-617-253-0943, zholly@mit.edu
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