Category: Stories FY24

Austin, Texas, USA—14^th December 2023: Neurophos, a spinout from Duke University and Metacept Inc., has raised a $7.2M USD seed round to productize a breakthrough in both metamaterials and optical AI inference chips.

The company has been funded in a round led by Gates Frontier and supported by MetaVC, Mana Ventures, AdAstral, and others. The seed funding will enable the production of a proprietary metasurface that serves as a tensor core processor enabled by its advanced optical properties. The company will also hire a team of engineers in Austin, Texas, a major silicon engineering hub.

While GPUs have had massive success in accelerating AI workloads, digital approaches are typically limited by power consumption.  On the other hand, proponents of optical computing techniques claim that photonics can vastly reduce power consumption and therefore accelerate compute speeds far beyond the bounds of what is possible with modern GPUs.

Columbus, Ohio – Jan. 30, 2024 – Basking Biosciences (Basking), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing a novel acute thrombolytic therapy to treat stroke, today announced the close of a $55 million financing. New investor ARCH Venture Partners led the round, with participation from additional new investors Insight Partners, Platanus, Solas BioVentures and RTW Investments, as well as existing investors Longview Ventures, Rev1 Ventures and The Ohio State University. Steven Gillis, Ph.D., Managing Director of ARCH Venture Partners will serve as Chairman of Basking’s Board of Directors.

“With the support and funding from our outstanding syndicate of life science investors, alongside the deep expertise of our Scientific and Clinical Advisory Board, we are eager to advance our innovative pipeline and improve patient outcomes,” said Richard Shea, Chief Executive Officer of Basking.

Basking will utilize the proceeds to accelerate clinical development of BB-031, a first-in-class, reversible RNA aptamer targeting von Willebrand Factor (vWF), engineered for rapid onset and short duration of effect. In 2023, the company announced positive Phase 1 results demonstrating the safety and tolerability of BB-031 with no serious adverse events reported, and dose-dependent inhibition of vWF. Basking will initiate a Phase 2 proof-of-concept trial, the RAISE trial, in patients with acute ischemic stroke (AIS) in 2024.

DURHAM, N.C. – Duke Health is part of a multi-institution research team receiving federal Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) funding to develop an osteoarthritis treatment that regenerates joints.

The research project, which includes teams from Boston Children’s Hospital and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, was awarded a contract of up to $33 million, funded in two phases over five years. The project director is Benjamin Alman, M.D., chair of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Duke University School of Medicine.

“We need a new approach to treating osteoarthritis, which is a leading cause of disability and represents a $128 billion cost burden on the U.S. health care system,” Alman said. “Regenerating cartilage and bone would be an effective therapy, and we have the technology, resources, and expertise to make this a reality.”

June 05, 2024 05:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

DURHAM, N.C.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–restor3d, the leader in 3D printed, personalized orthopedic implants, announced today the successful closing of a $55 million Series A funding round led by private investors including Summers Value Partners and existing investors plus an additional $15 million in debt financing led by Trinity Capital. This significant investment will accelerate the company’s growth and innovation in several key areas:

Release of New Patient-Specific 3D Printed Implant Systems

Consistent with our mission to deliver novel personalized medical solutions, restor3d will introduce new patient-specific implant systems for total ankle and shoulder replacements. These innovative systems will offer 3D printed solutions that fit the unique anatomy and pathology of individual patients. In the patient specific hip and knee portfolios we will continue to make product advancements including a porous press fit knee enabled by 3D printing of both the tibial and femoral components.

Invisibility casts a long shadow.

In 2006, physicist David Smith and colleagues at Duke and elsewhere published a paper about an experiment they had conducted. They used metamaterials to direct microwaves around an object so that the wave pattern that reached a receptor on the other side of the object looked pretty much like the pattern that would have been received if the object weren’t there. That is, to that specific wavelength of microwaves and in the two-dimensional experimental lab environment they had set up, the object was … kind of … invisible.

“Very much a science experiment that works in one wavelength,” and not even a wavelength we can see, Smith, the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of electrical and computer engineering, told an audience on a recent evening in a private dining room at the Washington Duke Inn. “Just to show the science of it.”

Try telling that to a journalist looking for a story. “Despite all the caveats,” Smith went on, “despite writing a paper that said, ‘This is not going to be Harry Potter’s cloak,’ the exact opposite happened.” The newspapers, the news shows – everyone went crazy for Smith’s invisibility cloak. For a couple of years, Smith answered constant media calls, was talked about by Jay Leno, Stephen Colbert and appeared on “The Today Show.”

“We were a question on ‘Jeopardy,’” he said. “And I thought, ‘What [else] am I going to do scientifically that’s going to have that much impact? I think I’d better think about commercialization.’”

Stefan Roberts found a passion for biomedical research early in life and kept at it through his time at Duke University, where he graduated with a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering in 2018.

Now, with support from Duke, he is growing a local start-up called inSoma Bio – developing biomaterials Roberts cooked up in the lab with his P.I., the Alan L. Kaganov Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering Ashutosh Chilkoti.

Roberts and the inSoma Bio team are first tackling the breast reconstruction space, using their technology to give mastectomy and lumpectomy patients a more natural reconstruction with their own tissue.

But this important application is just the beginning of how Roberts hopes inSoma Bio’s technology will improve patient and surgeon experiences.

On a cold, windy last Tuesday in November, around 300 people from the Duke community and entrepreneurial colleagues from across the Triangle came together to celebrate Duke inventors and innovations at the 5th Annual Invented at Duke event.

Faculty, staff, students, local investors and entrepreneurs, and many more enjoyed food and drink as they networked with each other and explored booths of featured inventors. Attendees guided chest tubes with novel medical devices, remixed footage with an interactive online platform, learned about metamaterial computer chips, and more as featured inventors from across Duke schools showed off their technologies.

The nine featured inventor booths, listed in more detail below, were not only varied in their departments, but in their technology and career stages. Full professors pitched their technologies alongside graduate students; more established startups rubbed shoulders with nascent prototypes.

What all these featured inventors had in common was plentiful interaction with Duke’s Office for Translation & Commercialization, which helped not only protect their technologies’ intellectual property but also connect the inventor teams with more resources and mentorship, internal to and external to the university.

“I wonder whether the conditions inside the body would affect the functionality?”

“They certainly might.”

Hansel Alex Hobbie, an ECE PhD candidate in the lab of Professor Aaron Franklin, was discussing the intricacies of his medical device invention with a group of graduate and professional students.

The technology: a way to incorporate 3D-printed electronics onto the surface of a catheter, which Hobbie has been developing in the lab with the initial thought to use the electronics as sensors for tracking medical procedures delivered via the catheter without having to remove it.

Having tinkered with the device in the lab for months, Hobbie was at ease parsing the technical considerations of the technology. But questions about the technology’s commercial potential were more challenging for him: Who exactly was the end user? Who would buy the product?

To answer these questions was the goal of thirty graduate and professional students from across Duke – PhD students, postdocs, medical residents, MBA students, and more – who assembled to gain entrepreneurial skills by pushing innovative technologies developed in Duke labs further down the commercialization pathway.

On Tuesday, September 12^th, Triangle Venture Day: Therapeutics 2023 invited investors from across the country to hear from rising star innovators of the robust therapeutics scene right here in our own backyard.

Jointly organized by Duke University, UNC-Chapel Hill, NC State University, and NCBiotech, the event brought bright minded, budding academic entrepreneurs together with venture capital investors to showcase our region’s cutting-edge biotech ecosystem and solutions to critical human health challenges. Taken together, their solutions span many fields, from proteomics to hydrogels, infectious disease to RNA therapeutics, rare diseases to oncology.

The day, hosted at Apella by Alexandria at the Alexandria Center^® for Advanced Technologies campus, proved to be one of promise of the Triangle’s growing innovation ecosystem, optimism for high-impact science, and enthusiasm for local collaboration.

Reactions at Triangle Venture Day to the region’s biotech scene were clear and straightforward: its scientific talent, industry prowess, and cross functional collaboration poise it to be an ever-evolving innovation ecosystem with sweeping economic implications — and it’s being noticed.

Duke professor of electrical and computer engineering Aaron Franklin just lost his job as chief technology officer of the company he founded six years ago, and he’s thrilled.

That’s because Franklin’s company Tyrata, which uses electronic sensors to monitor tire tread wear, was acquired—along with eight employees—by Bridgestone Americas. The technology that Franklin and his team developed was so functional, and the engineers so capable, that Franklin himself was no longer really needed.

His company successfully fledged the nest.

Franklin never held aspirations of starting his own company or imagined that he would spend years shepherding technology from his lab into the hands of fleet management clients around the world. But just a year into his tenure at Duke, he was invited to join a brainstorming session initiated by a private investor who’d been shaken up by a tire blowout and wanted to make roads safer.