As a doctor, Chris Laing knows a little Latin. As vice president of the University City Science Center, Laing has become intimately familiar with at least one Latin phrase: “Quod Erat Demonstrandum.” Loosely translated, it means “That Which Is Demonstrated,” and has become the motto for the QED Program, a technology transfer pathway for developing technologies, which recently announced $600,000 in new awards for 2010.
The QED Proof-of-Concept Program announced this week that three researchers from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Penn Medicine and Rutgers University will each receive $100,000 from the Science Center, a $100,000 match from their supporting institution, and business advice for one year. This second round of funding will go toward improving heart disease treatment and gene therapy, and will combat the “Valley of Death effect.”
“The “Valley of Death” is a gap in funding and other resources that commonly occurs between basic-science grants–from government sources, for example–and venture financing,” says Laing. “The QED Program helps to bridge it in two ways: firstly by providing seed-stage funding ($200k) to directly support commercially-relevant research and development, and secondly by engaging follow-on funders in the process, thereby creating ‘downstream’ funding opportunities.”
The researchers were chosen from respondents to an October, 2009, request for proposals that returned 61 responses from 16 universities in three states. The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Professor of Pediatrics & Pharmacology Dr. Robert J. Levy developed a technology that reduces the 100,000 surgeries performed each year in the U.S. to replace blocked stents. A group at Penn Medicine is developing a minimally invasive technique for replacing damaged heart valves. And Samuel I. Gunderson, Ph.D.’s team at Rutgers University is developing a brand-new method for silencing genes.
“With QED support, the potential of these commercially relevant technologies can be investigated quickly and efficiently in the lab,” said Laing. “Not only does this avoid the need to prematurely create new companies, but it also streamlines decisions about future investments in the technologies.”
Source: Dr. Chris Laing, University City Science Center
Writer: John Steele
