Seven Projects received the sixth annual NC State Chancellor’s Innovation Fund, a prize to  help researchers commercialize their inventions. In the past five years, $1.9 million have been awarded to 28 projects leading to 10 startup companies and 14 commercialization agreements. 

The fund has a competitive, three-part application process with the first two stages requiring the researchers to write papers on their discoveries. The third stage is a presentation, which  Gavin Williams, a bio-organic chemistry associate professor and recipient of the CIF, compared to the show “Shark Tank,” where applicants pitch their project to 30 “sharks.” 

The Technician spoke with a few of the winners.

Engineering New Antibiotics 

Williams works on  a more efficient way to make antibiotics using synthetic biology. The Williams Lab’s main research goal is to figure out how to engineer microbes so that they can make new versions of antibiotics, opposed to waiting for it to happen naturally. 

According to Williams, there is a need for a way to produce new drugs more quickly than is currently possible. He said they are looking at bacteria microbes and engineering them to assemble molecule building blocks to make complicated structures and new antibiotics. Nature already makes these molecules that are used to treat diseases and infections as natural products.

“So very broadly what we do is we figure out how nature makes those molecules and then we engineer it and we reprogram nature to make new versions of those molecules,” Williams said. 

The group figures out how the enzymes work so they can reprogram them and put them in different places, creating new versions of the antibiotics.

“One kind of way of making an analogy is to consider lego bricks,” Williams said. “So we want to Lego-ize biology by treating all those enzymes and parts of those pathway simply as Lego bricks. So we can just take those different Lego bricks, those different enzymes and reassemble them to make different particle pathways.”

Williams expects that this new technique could become widely practiced within the next few years.

“I really hope [the Chancellor’s Innovation Fund] continues,” Williams said. “It’s a really good mechanism for faculty to take their research to a different level, so I am very excited to be a part of it now and for it to move forward in the future.”

Sticky, Waterproof Particles

Orlin Velev, INVISTA professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and a recipient of the Chancellor’s Innovation Fund, discovered a special kind of particle.

Velev breaks down polymers into small, sticky, high-surface area particles. He described how the particle has a main backbone, and then it branches out from there, leading to a high surface, similar to how geckos stick to walls. This makes the particle very sticky and water-resistant. 

He would like to start introducing this technology into a wide range of consumer products. 

“The Chancellor’s Innovation Fund gives us the opportunity to scale out this process so we started with the small scale particles, make them in larger amounts, give samples to potential industrial collaborators to test, and then on the base of these sample so they can be interested in the technology, it can be licensed,” Velev said.

A coating of these particles would make a better adhesive than current alternatives and make materials completely water-repellent, according to Velev. 

“Water repellent coatings would be one of the typical applications,” Velev said. “If you deposited the coating like that on the surface, then it is going to repel water, but it is also going to repel different types of contaminants. You can deposit in a variety of consumer products, for example, say you have a ketchup bottle because ketchup is one type of material that is very hard to get out of the bottle without making it stick to the surface.”

He also envisions the potential for applications in adhesives, foods and cosmetic products.

Secure Web Application for Businesses 

Tom Miller, a McPherson Family Distinguished Professor of Engineering Entrepreneurship, and computer science researcher John Bass worked together to create a better, more secure tool for businesses.

“The software is basically a way to do spreadsheet computations as a web service,” Miller said.  

The tool allows businesses to share their data more securely. They enter their data into an Excel spreadsheet, and the program turns it into a web service that has all of the same numbers and tables without sharing the formulas behind the data. 

“They need to keep the details of those spreadsheets secret because that is their core business, but they need to share that with their employees, with their sales force, sometimes with their customers, but do it in such a way that they can’t see all the formulas and all the data that goes into those calculations,” Miller said.

Many people who make Excel spreadsheets would like to build web applications, but they can’t do that without hiring a programmer, according to Miller. This technology will make this process completely automatic.

“You can really build modern applications that don’t look like an old, clunky spreadsheet, but you don’t have to do any programming other than building a spreadsheet itself to make it happen,” Miller said.

The application is more oriented toward small businesses that don’t have a large programming staff, according to Miller. 

Faster Medical Diagnostic Tests

Brian Cummins, Glenn Walker and Frances Ligler, researchers with the joint NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill Department of Biomedical Engineering, have developed a better way to run diagnostic medical tests.

“What we have been working on is something that can improve the ability to make tests that can be used by people right on the spot,” Cummins said. “A lot of clinical or medical tests are done in the core lab or core hospital, and so sometimes that can take longer than maybe it needs to. And so potentially what we are trying to do is make tests that can be done right on the spot.”

Surgeons reached out asking for a better way to test blood while in surgery, according to Walker. More specifically, they were looking for a way to quickly run blood tests during a surgery in which glands are removed from the neck. Previously, the test would take 20 minutes.

With this new invention, the process could be done right on the spot, and it would only take about five minutes. Other tests can take about 45 minutes to an hour, and they would like to reduce that time to about 10 minutes. 

They said that this is a low-cost and self-powered way of manipulating small amounts of fluid that goes into a chip.

“Brian’s work has been to make these pumps that actually make it constantly flow and give you a much better signal, detect a much lower concentrations of the molecule that’s present in the blood,” Walker said.

The money from CIF will help the group improve the product further and eventually allow them to commercialize the project. The researchers hope that this can happen within a year of receiving the grant.