By Lauren Otis, Staff Writer
A device that will improve cancer treatment and cost. A green energy system generating electricity from sunlight and water. A molecular solution to antibiotic resistance. These ideas and more were presented to the public at the third annual Princeton — Jumpstart Innovation Forum, held at the Friend Center on Wednesday evening.
At the forum, Princeton students and faculty were allotted four minutes each to pitch the commercial possibilities of their research findings.
The annual event is co-sponsored by the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education at Princeton — recently renamed after the announcement of a $25 million gift from alumnus Dennis Keller and his wife Constance Templeton Keller — and the Jumpstart New Jersey Angel Network, an investor group which provides early-stage investment capital for promising entrepreneurial ideas and ventures. The law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP also provided financial sponsorship for the event.
”The problem with chemotherapy is it is incredibly expensive and incredibly ineffective,” often with less than 1 percent of cancer killing drugs in the body actually going to a tumor, said Christian Thériault, a master’s degree candidate in the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering.
An “implantable multi-modal therapeutic device” about the size of a pea, developed in the lab of Professor Wole Soboyejo, would enable drugs to be implanted and regularly delivered right to a tumor, Mr. Thériault said. An automatic internal mechanism (which could also be triggered externally) would heat the device at the needed intervals, every few days or weeks, and release the drug agent, he said.
A far smaller amount of cancer killing drugs would be needed, with toxic side-effects to patients far reduced, Mr. Thériault said. With a typical chemotherapy cost of around $9,000 “we believe that with our device we could reduce that by a third,” he said.
”We are focusing on early-stage cancers, breast cancer being one of them,” although the device could be utilized for diabetes or any other chronic disease that requires targeted weekly or monthly treatments, Mr. Thériault said.
G. Charles Dismukes, a professor of chemistry, described how he and several colleagues have developed a prototype device which combines solar power and fuel cell technology to generate electricity from the sun and water. Their “water-oxidizing photo anode” device would split water into hydrogen and oxygen ions through solar power, he said. “The idea is to get clean renewable energy,” Mr. Dismukes said, noting that off-grid hydrogen generation “is a huge area of potential application.”
Although they are at the beginning of developing the technology for commercial purposes — “we don’t have a business model, we are scientists, we are not entrepreneurs yet” — Mr. Dismukes said that with the prototype device “we now have the beginnings of a true green catalyst that has scalable qualities.”
Lee Swem, a postdoctoral fellow in the molecular biology department, described research there into interfering with “quorum sensing” of populations of bacteria as a way of controlling infectious diseases.
There has been little development of new antibiotic strategies among commercial pharmaceutical companies because of the belief that traditional antibiotics have already solved the problem of bacterial infection, Mr. Swem said, but “traditional antibiotics promote drug resistance,” and antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections emerging from hospitals “are a major health problem.”
He added, “What we think we have here are multiple drug targets which could be produced in turning off virulence in bacteria.,”
Where traditional antibiotics work by directly killing off bacteria, with resistance an inevitable byproduct, his department’s work aims to interfere with bacterial cell-to-cell molecular communication — known as quorum sensing — and prevent the accumulation of bacterial signals from hitting a threshold which “turns on virulence,” Mr. Swem said.
Testing of the research is ready to progress, Mr. Swem said. “We need to move into additional animal models, rat or mouse (testing of the therapy), we need to move up,” he said.
Other presentations described the commercial potential of low-cost, rapid-focus “tunable acoustic gradient index” lenses; a “dynamic resource management system” software library to improve efficiencies in freight transportation, investment management, and the management of high-value replacement parts, among other applications; and “mid-infrared quantum cascade lasers” as highly sensitive and low-cost commercial measurement devices of everything from trace chemicals in the air to breath tests.
