INVO Newsletter
Summer 2019   
                                                                                                                                                              
Lakeside Discovery Announces First Awardees




In April, Lakeside Discovery, the collaboration between Northwestern and Deerfield Management established in 2018, announced support for two Northwestern labs to advance their drug discovery projects. 
  • Elizabeth McNally, Elizabeth J. Ward Professor and director of the Center for Genetic Medicine, and Alexis Demonbreun, research assistant professor of pharmacology, both at Feinberg School of Medicine, will co-lead a multi-year project to advance pharmaceuticals for the treatment of muscular dystrophies.
  • Ali Shilatifard, Robert Francis Furchgott Professor and chair of biochemistry and molecular genetics at Feinberg, will lead a multi-year project to advance pharmaceuticals for the treatment of cancers.
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2019 Catalyst Award Recipients
In January 2019, Northwestern Medicine and Northwestern University McCormick School of Engineering announced a new collaborative commitment to expanding strong ties between institutions. The $55,000 Collaborative Research Catalyst Award is one component of this effort, maximizing research capabilities.  Eligible teams of physicians and engineering faculty were invited to apply for this seed grant to pursue new healthcare research.

More Details on the 2019 Awardees

The Catalyst Award was given to two teams, including Profs. Jonathan Rivnay (McCormick), Aggelos Katsaggelos (McCormick), Todd Parrish (Feinberg and McCormick) and Prof. Erin Hsu (Feinberg).    

(left) Profs. Katsaggelos and Parrish will partner with Northwestern Medicine neurosurgeon,  Dr. S. Kathleen Bandt, and radiology post-doc, Pierre Besson, to create new imaging tools to enable the earlier diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. 
(right) Profs. Rivnay and Hsu will partner with Northwestern Medicine spine surgeon, Dr. Wellington Hsu, to study new techniques in bone regeneration and spine fusion. 
 
 
                                                                                                                                                              
N.XT Fund Update
Established in 2015, the $10 MM N.XT Fund is designed to promote early stage university technologies to the next stages of commercialization.Previous N.XT Funding has provided venture investments to EnMed MicroAnalytics (2018), Yobee (2018), Preora Diagnostics (2017) and Third Coast Therapeutics (2017) as well as seed investments to ALS Therapy (2016) and Battery Technology, now Volexion (2016).  
 
N.XT Fund awarded Northwestern startup, Bold Diagnostics, with a 2019 award.  Bold is developing an innovative, cuffless blood pressure monitoring technology to better manage and diagnose hypertension.  Their first product, Bold CTRL, is an intelligent blood pressure monitoring device that is portable and does not require a cuff and yet provides clinically accurate beat-to-beat measurements as well as cloud connectivity for data storage and sharing.  N.XT Funding will enable the BOLD team to meet key milestones, including finalizing their design freeze and completing a large scale clinical study. 
                                                                                                                                                              
NewCures Accelerator Update
NewCures is a biomedical accelerator focused on developing potential therapeutics from Northwestern research laboratories with an aim to enhance and de-risk early-stage discoveries.  Current NewCures Projects include: (1) Myc Inhibitors for Cancer Therapy (Sarki Abdulkadir, MD, PhD and Gary Schiltz, PhD); (2) OAT Inhibitor for Hepatocellular Carcinoma (Richard Silverman, PhD); and recently awarded (3) MNK Inhibitor Therapy for Glioblastoma (Leonidas Platanias, MD, PhD and Gary Shiltz, PhD); and (4) Positive Allosteric Modulators of the Human Serotonin Receptor 2c (Herbert Meltzer, MD and Karl Scheidt, PhD).


                                                                                                                                                              
2019 Research Gift Recipients
                                                                                                                                                              
2019 NCAI-CC Awardee
The latest and final NIH Center for Accelerated Innovations at Cleveland Clinic (NCAI-CC) translational grant was awarded to Dr. William Muller (Feinberg) for his project, "A unique therapeutic to block myocardial ischemia/reperfusion injury following myocardial infarction." The overall goal of this project is to advance a novel peptide therapy (Tat-KLC1c), discovered in the Muller lab, as an adjuvant therapeutic for ischemia/reperfusion injury (IRI), a condition that may develop post-myocardial infarction (MI) events. Current treatment for acute MI events is percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). This proposed adjuvant therapy to PCI will be a paradigm shift in the acute management of cardiovascular patients.
                                                                                                                                                              
INVO Newsletter Archives 

INVO newsletters capture key innovation and entrepreneurial activities at Northwestern. Featured news includes: faculty startup announcements, Northwestern University patenting and licensing activities, funding opportunities for inventors and entrepreneurs, and INVO events and programming focused on commercialization and entrepreneurship.

The INVO newsletter reaches the Northwestern University community, prospective licensees, investors, and others interested in groundbreaking research with commercialization potential. Access previous newsletter in our archives here.
                                                                                                                                                              
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