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We are excited to share news that the Blavatnik Fund for Innovation at Yale is expanding its reach beyond therapeutics and medical devices. We are inviting applications from innovators working in the digital health, healthcare IT and related spaces to submit proposals for funding consideration. Applications are now open. I'm looking forward to seeing applications from Yale innovators working in these groundbreaking areas. We have a number of informational sessions scheduled for this month if you would like to learn more about the process. Please see below for session dates and times.
We are also pleased to share that Yale is seeking a Senior Associate Provost for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. This is an exciting time for Yale’s innovation ecosystem, and we are grateful to all of you who are part of it.
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Lisa D’Angelo, PhD
Interim Managing Director Yale OCR
Associate Provost for Research
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THE BLAVATNIK FUND FOR INNOVATION AT YALE
Upcoming Lunch & Learns and Info-Sessions
Are you a Yale Investigator? If so, we highly encourage you to attend one of these varying lunch & learn meetings to learn more about the Blavatnik Fund application process, how to put together a successful pitch and to learn about developing a medical device.
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How to Apply for Blavatnik Funding: A Lunch and Learn
October 6th, 2021 | 12:00PM-1:00PM
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October 20, 2021 | 4:00PM-5:ooPM
Location: Hope Memorial Building, 315 Cedar St. at Yale, H216
Please join Bill Wiesler, Director of New Ventures and of The Blavatnik Fund for Innovation at Yale, who will discuss the process and best practices for applying for Blavatnik funding. Attendance is limited to principal investigator participants who would be prospective PIs on 2021-22 Blavatnik applications. To reserve your spot, send a note with your interest in applying to bill.wiesler@yale.edu.
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October 7, 2021 | 12:00-1:00PM
Location: Virtual
Please join Adam Lehman, President at Synectic, Mac McMurray, Director of Business Development at Synectic, and Morag Grassie, Sr. Associate Director of the Blavatnik Fund for Innovation at Yale, for this informative lunch and learn about the complexities of developing a medical device, and navigating FDA 510(k) compliance. Synectic will also hold office hours after the talk. To reserve your spot, send a note with your interest to morag.grassie@yale.edu.
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How to Apply for Blavatnik Funding by Bill Wiesler & Thinking like an Entrepreneur: an in-depth workshop on creating a startup value proposition by Colin Foster
October 13, 2021 | 2:00-3:00PM
Location: Virtual
Please join Colin Foster, Yale Entrepreneur-In-Residence and CEO of iSci Management LLC, who will discuss how to put together a successful pitch. All Yale innovators are welcome. To reserve your spot, send a note with your interest to michelle.mcqueen@yale.edu.
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SAVE THE DATE!
Yale Lifesciences PitchFest
December 3rd, 2021
11:00AM-4:00PM
More to be announced soon!
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Yale University seeks a visionary and collaborative leader to serve as the Senior Associate Provost for Entrepreneurship and Innovation |
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The Blavatnik Fund for Innovation at Yale to fund software projects in the life sciences in 2021 (Now Accepting Applications!) |
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Five Women Innovators to Pitch Ideas at Yale's First "Dolphin Tank" Event |
Yale's Soderstrom, an Architect of New Haven's Bioscience Ecosystem, Calls it a Career |
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Partner News: Tech Innovator Names Alva Health as 2021 Global Competition Winner at the MedTech Conference |
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President Biden Invites Yale School of Public Health Scientist to Participate in COVID-19 Global Summit Hosted by United Nations |
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Yale's Aaron Ring: What Causes Long COVID is a Mystery. Here's How Scientists are Trying to Crack It |
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Listen to the Tech Transfer IP Podcast, Hosted by Lisa Mueller, as Former Yale OCR Research Managing Director Jon Soderstrom Describes His Career Journey |
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Greater New Haven's Tech 25 Includes Many Yale Spinouts |
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Blavatnik Award Winner Nikhil S. Malvankar Led Studies to Show Hidden Bacterial Hairs Power Nature's 'Electric Grid' |
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Current, state-wide industry news. |
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Spinout Spotlight
Felix Biotechnology
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Q: What is the core problem that Felix Biotechnology is aiming to solve?
Dr. Paul Turner: The work at Felix derives from my lab’s interest in understanding how bacteria evolve in response to changes in their environment, and in particular, in response to antibiotic drugs. This evolved resistance is a growing threat to our healthcare system and has the potential to cause pandemic-level problems, not just for bacterial infections but for all interventions that require antibiotics (like surgeries, chemotherapies, etc). The WHO estimates that by 2050, 10M people will die per year of drug-resistant bacterial infections. Our current arsenal of antibiotic drugs is not enough to prevent this crisis, and recent efforts to develop new antibiotic drugs have been stymied. We need new tools to treat these deadly infections and prevent the spread of drug-resistant bacteria.
Q: That’s an incredibly important issue! What is Felix’s solution to this problem?
Dr. Robert McBride: While existing antibiotics are small molecule drugs, we are taking a different approach by harnessing the natural enemies of bacteria: bacteriophage, or phage. These are viruses that specifically infect and kill bacteria, and they were discovered before antibiotics and have long been posited to be an alternative way to treat infections. However, given the relative ease of small molecule drugs, research into phage therapy has lagged behind, and it is only now that we have the tools (including tools like CRISPR which allow us to effectively engineer lytic viruses) necessary to truly turn phage into an effective treatment option.
Q: What were the initial insights from the research done at Yale that served as the basis for Felix’s technology?
Dr. Paul Turner: We were studying how bacteria evolve in response to phage attack. Like with antibiotic drugs, bacteria can evolve resistance to phage, and also similarly, evolving resistance often requires a tradeoff, meaning that for the bacteria to gain resistance they must lose some other trait in the process. We asked the question whether we could identify phages that could either 1) kill drug-resistant bacteria, or 2) if the bacteria did evolve resistance to the phage, it forced a tradeoff that resulted in the loss of drug resistance or a decrease in bacterial virulence, hence making the infection less deadly. From this research, which was led by a scientist in my group named Ben Chan, we identified three phages that could drive these advantageous tradeoffs in Pseudomonas aeruginosa, one of the most common multi-drug resistant bacteria in the world. While we’ve launched a small clinical trial called CY-PHY to test the efficacy of these phages in cystic fibrosis patients with chronic P. aeruginosa lung infections, we realized that to take these phages and turn them into a widely available, accessible treatment, we would need to found a company.
Q: How is Felix building off this foundational work?
Dr. Robert McBride: We’ve licensed the IP of the three phages in the CY-PHY clinical trial, but we aren’t stopping there. We are super-charging this approach by incorporating machine learning and synthetic biology to create a platform to build phage with optimal properties like the ability to drive these clinically-meaningful tradeoffs. We believe our ability to effectively engineer evolution will be key to advancing phage technology.
Q: What are the biggest hurdles for taking this technology from the lab to the clinic?
Dr. Robert McBride: We are in the midst of an exciting Series A raise and these funds will help us transform how phage therapy is delivered. Today, phage therapy is only available as a highly bespoke, personalized treatment at a limited number of healthcare centers, like Yale New Haven Hospital. Our Series A will help us to create a generalized, effective therapy that will expand access to phage therapy to the broader population. This is particularly important given that the highest burden of drug-resistant bacteria is in developing nations. We want to live in a world where bacterial infections are no longer a threat to our global health.
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