WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Purdue University researchers in the College of Agriculture, College of Pharmacy and College of Science have received $175,000 from the Trask Innovation Fund to develop Purdue-owned intellectual property for commercial use. The innovations are in the areas of cancer therapeutics, cellular targeting and manipulation, and superabsorbent materials.

The fund is managed by the Purdue Innovates Incubator, which provides programming for the Purdue University community to ideate, refine and support their solutions. Funding recipients can receive up to $50,000 for their initial project; they may reapply a maximum of three times to receive up to an aggregate cap of $100,000 to support the same technology.

Between the 2013 and 2023 fiscal years, around $3 million in Trask funding has been awarded to 81 projects. Forty percent of the technologies that have received Trask funding have been licensed or optioned to industry.

The application deadline for the next round of funding is Sept. 27. The Trask Proposal Template can be downloaded and edited. Questions about applications can be submitted to [email protected].

The spring 2024 Trask Innovation Fund recipients, their projects and award amounts are:

Andrea Kasinski; College of Science, Purdue Institute for Cancer Research, and Purdue Institute for Drug Discovery; "A First-in-Class Fully Modified MicroRNA for Targeted Cancer Treatment"; $45,920

Kasinski is deputy director of the Purdue Institute for Cancer Research and an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. She and her research team are developing effective, nontoxic therapies to treat non-small cell lung cancer. The World Cancer Research Fund International reported almost 2.5 million new cases were diagnosed in 2022. Kasinski said most patients are diagnosed after the tumor has metastasized, or spread from the lungs to other parts of the body.

"Patients with metastatic disease have a dismal five-year survival of around 8%," she said. "Our agents can help these patients."

Most cancers are not caused by a single change, which means they require therapies that target a variety of cancer-causing genes. This has led to traditional combinatorial therapy, or treatment with multiple agents.

Kasinski's research targets multiple cancer drivers with a single agent, acting as a multidrug cocktail.

"The ability to simultaneously target multiple genes that cancer cells are addicted to results in increased efficacy and reduces the chance that the tumor will recur," she said.

Research to develop the Purdue agents will focus on achieving specific delivery and improving stability. The agents are small RNA, or ribonucleic acids, single-strand nucleic acids found in all living cells. Kasinski and her team have developed a chemically modified version that is 400-fold more stable and has achieved specific delivery to cancer cells.

"The Trask funding will allow us to complete studies to highlight our agents' improved efficacy and reduced toxicity compared to previously tested formulations," she said. "We will also conduct stability and pharmacology experiments, which will significantly de-risk our therapy, leading to increased interest by investors."

Senay Simsek; College of Agriculture; "New Technologies for Developing Bio-Based Superabsorbent for Industrial Applications"; $50,000

Simsek leads a team of researchers using cellulose extracted from hemp and refined through a sequence of treatments to create the patent-pending superabsorbent materials. Simsek is a professor in and the head of the Department of Food Science, and holds the Dean's Chair in Food Science.

"We are passionate about the potential of our product to make a significant environmental impact," Simsek said. "By introducing a commercial product that helps save our planet, we aim to lead the way in sustainable innovation - helping to heal the planet one application at a time."

Simsek and her team tested the hemp-based superabsorbent materials using standardized absorbency tests, comparing them against traditional superabsorbent materials. She said hemp hurd showed significantly higher absorption capacity than traditional materials.

"This validation underscores not only the effectiveness of our technology but also its potential to replace less sustainable options in the market, offering a biodegradable and renewable alternative," she said.

Simsek will use the funding to acquire larger-scale bioreactors and scale up the technology to produce superabsorbent material in greater quantities.

"Until now, our results have been based on lab-scale experiments," she said. "Scaling up is a critical step for testing in various industrial applications and a crucial move toward turning our ideas into reality."

Yoon Yeo; College of Pharmacy, Purdue Institute for Cancer Research, and Purdue Institute for Drug Discovery; "Immunoactive Complex for Cancer Immunotherapy"; $50,000

Yeo leads a team of researchers developing a nanoparticle formulation called IMAX, or immunoactive complexes, to explore how the body's innate immune system can be harnessed to cure cancer. Yeo is the Lillian Barboul Thomas Professor in and the associate head of the Department of Industrial and Molecular Pharmaceutics with a courtesy appointment in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering.

The current immunotherapy approaches largely focus on the adaptive immune system, including checkpoint inhibitors and engineering T cells. Yeo said the innate immune system, which is crucial for initiating adaptive responses, remains underexplored.

"Innate immune cells, such as dendritic cells and natural killer cells, often remain inactive or even promote tumor growth due to immunosuppressive factors in the tumor microenvironment," she said. "Effective strategies are needed to overcome this suppression and coordinate a robust antitumor response, supporting both innate and adaptive immune functions."

IMAX stimulates the innate immune system and induces immunogenic cell death to trigger robust antitumor responses. When administered intratumorally, IMAX eliminates primary tumors and protects against metastasis and tumor relapse.

"IMAX has been validated in preclinical mouse models of various cancers, including breast cancer, colon cancer, pancreatic cancer, head and neck cancer, and melanoma," Yeo said. "In these studies, IMAX consistently demonstrated robust antitumor activity, increased survival rates and conferred resistance to tumor recurrence. The methodology and results were published in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."

Yeo said the funding will be used in performing preclinical studies to support the translation of IMAX technology.

"We will evaluate the pharmacokinetics, biodistribution and safety of IMAX to de-risk the technology and gain confidence of commercialization partners and investors," she said. "This study will also help us to get NIH (National Institutes of Health) Small Business Innovation Research funding that supports small business."

Jesse Chi Zhang; College of Science, Purdue Institute for Cancer Research, and Purdue Institute of Inflammation, Immunology and Infectious Disease; "Precision Opto-Control System To Manipulate Chemical Processes in Cells"; $30,000

Zhang leads a team of researchers working on real-time precision opto-control, or RPOC, which uses a laser-based approach to provide users with site-specific and chemical-specific control of chemical processes within live cells. Zhang is an assistant professor in Purdue's James Tarpo Jr. and Margaret Tarpo Department of Chemistry.

A five-minute video about the technology is available on the Purdue Chemistry YouTube channel.

"The imaging capability of our system has been compared to that of a commercial confocal fluorescence microscope, showing very similar results in resolution and imaging speed," he said. "What sets it apart is its opto-control capability, a feature not offered by traditional confocal microscopes."

RPOC's initial applications are within the life sciences, namely fundamental biological research. Zhang said RPOC also exhibits considerable potential for pharmaceutical research because it can facilitate the elucidation of site-specific drug functions within cells or animals.

"We are actively exploring using RPOC to regulate cell division, embryo development and cancer cell migration by precisely uncaging or activating compounds at desired subcellular sites," he said. "This pursuit holds promise for the development of novel methodologies to manipulate cellular behaviors and cell fate."

Zhang said the Trask funding will be used to purchase two more lasers and a faster galvanometer scanning system to complete construction of the RPOC prototype.

These innovations and others created by Purdue researchers are available for further development and licensing. Contact the Purdue Innovates Office of Technology Commercialization at [email protected] for more information.

Why the Trask Innovation Fund matters

Awards from the Trask Innovation Fund support Purdue researchers through the "valley of death," which is the time between the creation of a new innovation and its adoption in the marketplace.

Sometimes it takes years for an innovation to garner industry attention. Matt Dressler, Purdue Innovates Incubator's funds manager, said researchers may face several obstacles during that time.

"These challenges include a technology becoming obsolete or an inventor feeling dispirited because of a lack of progress," he said. "Trask funding can address those challenges as Purdue faculty develop a discovery into a viable marketplace product. The fund complements several other Purdue Innovates resources provided to university inventors and entrepreneurs."

About Purdue Innovates Incubator

Purdue Innovates Incubator is the front door to the rich ecosystem of programs and services designed to help early-stage startups take their next step. Programs provide settings for cohort work and one-on-one consultations. Content includes clarifying problems from the customer's perspective, developing a business model, conducting customer discovery interviews, team building, determining regulatory pathways and legal structures, and more. Purdue alumni and community members interested in becoming mentors are invited to contact the Incubator team.

About Purdue University

Purdue University is a public research institution demonstrating excellence at scale. Ranked among top 10 public universities and with two colleges in the top four in the United States, Purdue discovers and disseminates knowledge with a quality and at a scale second to none. More than 105,000 students study at Purdue across modalities and locations, including nearly 50,000 in person on the West Lafayette campus. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue's main campus has frozen tuition 13 years in a row. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap - including its first comprehensive urban campus in Indianapolis, the Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business, Purdue Computes and the One Health initiative - at https://www.purdue.edu/president/strategic-initiatives.

Writer/Media contact: Steve Martin, [email protected]

Source: Matt Dressler, [email protected]

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