The biomedical commercialisation hub will invest $200,000 in four to six startups each year from University of Washington and other local centres of research.
University of Washington has set up an early-stage biomedical research bridge with $4m in matching funding from US government-funded grant body National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The scheme, dubbed Washington Entrepreneurial Research Evaluation and Commercialization Hub (We-Reach), will have a $1.4m annual budget.
UW will participate through its incubator CoMotion, in addition to the Institute for Protein Design and School of Pharmacy.
Other partners include Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute, Seattle Children’s Hospital and additional undisclosed universities in the US states of Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho.
We-Reach will fund four to six biomedical startups with up to $200,000 every year. In addition to University of Washington, the program will also target other local research centres allied to the institution.
The program aims to take forward projects in areas such as new medicines, diagnostics, genetic testing and health technologies, offering expertise as well as funding in areas not typically covered by research grants.
We-Reach is one of five US research commercialisation initiatives to be selected for NIH funding in 2019.
Fiona Wills, assistant vice-president for innovation and development at CoMotion, said: “Spinning life science innovations out of research institutions requires expertise and funding that is hard to source in the academic environment.
“We-Reach builds on the infrastructure CoMotion has developed, including our gap fund and training, to provide critical resources needed to de-risk promising technologies into preclinical and clinical development.”
