Month: August 2018

On Wednesday, May 1^st, over a dozen venture capital firms gathered for the first Duke Venture Day at the newly refurbished Chesterfield Building in downtown Durham.

The day-long event showcased therapeutic innovations currently coming out of Duke. This year’s goal was to engage the venture investing community in the drug and biotech arena to advance fundable ideas and develop deeper connections with Durham.

“What we’re seeing is more and more biotech investors interested in exploring outside the traditional biotech hubs of Boston and the Bay Area,” said Rob Hallford, Director of Duke New Ventures. “Duke Venture Day is about raising the profile of not just Duke spin-outs, but the Triangle in general as a place to find exciting new companies and put capital to work.”

Eight Duke start-up investment opportunities were presented at the Venture Day–from highly targeted radiotherapy for brain metastasis to therapies for ocular graft-versus-host disease.

As a former cigarette factory turned medical and engineering research lab, The Chesterfield set the stage to promote Durham’s transformation from a tobacco town to an innovation hub. Additionally, with a fishbowl-like view right off the open atrium, the NC Biolabs easily elucidated how its shared lab facilities can help launch a newly formed start-up from just a single bench.

The Biolabs currently has 36 start-ups working in the shared lab space, 15 of them are Duke newcos. An early tenant and Duke spinout, Element Genomics, has already had a successful exit, having been acquired by UCB for $30 million.

Entrepreneur turned venture capitalist, Clay Thorp from Hatteras Venture Partners was on hand to moderate a panel on Doing Biotech Business in North Carolina. Panelists included Mark Velleca from G1 Therapeutics, Meg Booth Powell from TARGET Pharmasolutions, and Matt Kane from Duke start-up Precision Biosciences.

“I firmly believe that Durham’s unique combination of a highly skilled community and relatively low cost of doing business, makes it the ideal place to start and build a biotechnology company,” said Matt Kane, CEO and co-founder of Precision Biosciences.

Precision, a genome editing company dedicated to improving life through its proprietary ARCUS genome editing platform located in downtown Durham, recently went public last month raising over $145M.

MEET THE FEATURED INNOVATORS

Each of the presenting start-up companies had the opportunity to speak in front of venture capitals, both local and from as far north as Boston.

Cereius, which aims to improve the lives and survival of patients facing solid tumor brain metastasis through the use of personalized and highly targeted radiotherapy, was presented by Michael Zalutsky, Professor of Neuro-Oncology Research and a Professor in the Departments of Radiology, Radiation Oncology, Pathology and Biomedical Engineering

 

Gavilán Biodesign, founded out of Bruce Donald’s laboratory in Computer Science, Chemistry, and Biochemistry, was recently selected as one of 11 early-stage biotech companies at the Silicon Valley biotech accelerator, IndieBio. Their technology combines state of the art physics-based modeling with a unique high accuracy AI platform to computationally screen trillions of molecules in order to find therapeutics that can overcome resistance.

 

Tellus Therapeutics, founded by neonatologist Eric Benner, is developing novel small molecules derived from human maternal breast milk demonstrated to induce regeneration of myelin-producing oligodendrocytes and reverse white matter injury in animal models of perinatal brain injury.

 

Cellective BioTherapy, founded by veteran entrepreneur and noted immunologist Tomas Tedder, is developing first-in-class regulatory B10 cell-based immunotherapies for treating cancers, autoimmunity, and immunodeficiency that can either enhance or inhibit immune responses as needed for disease treatment.

 

Sisu Pharma, Inc. recently founded by Dennis Thiele, Professor of Molecular Genetics & Microbiology and Jiaoti Huang, Chair for the School of Medicine’s Department of Pathology, is developing drugs against a new target to treat prostate cancer in patients who have exhausted all therapeutic options.

 

 

Mastezellen Bio, Inc., started by fellow pathologists, Herman Staats and Soman Abraham, is developing novel therapeutics to inhibit mast cell activation, potent proinflammatory cells that cause symptoms of allergy and anaphylaxis in a wide range of disease states such as adverse drug reactions, food allergy, mastocytosis, and seasonal rhinitis.

 

Basking Bio, founded by endovascular neurosurgeon and research scientist, Shai Nimjee, is developing a drug-antidote pair for treatment of patients with ischemic stroke using technologies founded out of Duke Professor of Surgery, Bruce Sullenger’s Cardiovascular Biology Lab.

 

Pulsar Life Sciences is another company started by ophthalmologist Scott Cousins developing an eye drop formulation for the treatment of inflammatory dry eye disease, including ocular graft versus host disease that occurs after hematopoietic stem cell transplantation.

Autonomous flight beyond visual line of sight will be key to the kinds of drone delivery operations envisioned by Amazon, Walmart and other retailers.

During Wednesday’s flight, a Skyfront Perimeter multirotor drone inspected a 3.87-mile stretch of Trans-Alaska Pipeline infrastructure as part of the University of Alaska’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Pilot Program, one of 10 such programs that won approval from the Federal Aviation Administration last year.

The big thing about this flight is that the drone made use of Iris Automation’s Casia onboard detect-and-avoid system, paired up with Echodyne’s ground-based MESA airspace management radar system, without having a human on the route.

Current FAA regulations limit drone flights to the operator’s visual line of sight. Pilot projects have been experimenting with technologies that can ensure safe operations beyond the visual line of sight, known as BVLOS. But until now, the FAA’s waivers still required a ground-based observer to look out for non-cooperative aircraft coming into the test area.

This week’s flight of a drone totally on its own was authorized after it flew the same route with visual observers.

“The test mission designed by the team at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks is an excellent demonstration of the potential for commercial UAS,” Eben Frankenberg, the founder and CEO of Echodyne, said in a news release. “With Iris Automation and Echodyne sensor technologies, routine commercial missions like linear inspection and medical deliveries to remote communities are both practical and safe.”

The radar system developed by Echodyne relies on metamaterials technology, which uses specially structured electronics to bend electromagnetic waves. Circuits based on metamaterials can allow for the construction of flat-panel radar devices that match the performance of larger, more expensive phased array antennas.

 

READ THE FULL STORY HERE

 

[Originally posted by Geek Wire — August 2, 2019]

According to Allied Market Research, a demand for quantum computing could drive a market worth US$5.8 billion by 2025, representing a compound annual growth rate of more than 30 percent.

But for Stewart Allen, COO of quantum computing startup IonQ, that figure may be an underestimation.

“What I would say is that in the next 18 to 24 months, when someone hits upon a real problem that they’re solving with real results from QC, then that could open the floodgates that makes [that figure] look small.

“In the next 12 months, it will be select groups [with access to quantum computers],” Allen told TechHQ. “12 months out from that, it will be ‘broad brush’, with everyone rushing out to train themselves– [access] will be across all industries.”

Smaller quantum contenders

Founded in 2015, IonQ has been built with “modest budgets”. But its technology– based on the use of ‘natural’ qubits– is attracting the interest of world-leading organizations.

Other ‘close’ rivals– or quantum computing companies of IonQ’s size– tend to use manufactured qubits made from silicon. IonQ is one of very few employing the method of ion trapping where qubits are made of natural particles such as atoms, electrons or protons.

 

READ THE FULL STORY HERE

 

[Originally posted by T_HQ — July 23, 2019]

About IonQ

We’re building the world’s best quantum computers to solve the world’s hardest problems.

We believe useful quantum computers will look as different from the laptops and smartphones we use every day as classical computers appear next to an abacus. And we believe the best way to build a quantum computer is by starting with nature’s qubit: the atom. Accurate, powerful, and flexible, ionized atoms are the heart of our quantum systems.

After decades of research, IonQ was founded in 2015 by Chris Monroe and Jungsang Kim with $2 million in seed funding from New Enterprise Associates, a license to core technology from the University of Maryland and Duke University, and the goal of taking trapped ion quantum computing out of the lab and into the market. The next year, we raised an additional $20 million from GV, Amazon Web Services, and NEA, and built two of the world’s most accurate quantum computers.

ABOUT REALTIME ROBOTICS

ORIGINALLY POSTED HERE