New $20 million Drexel University endowment to build businesses around biomedical research

Another announcement that came during Philly Tech Week featured funding for an initiative that would better integrate business plans and biomedical research.

Drexel University was awarded $10 million by the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation to endow the Coulter Translational Research Partnership program. The University matched the Coulter Foundation’s grant creating a $20 million endowment to bring life saving solutions to clinical practice by moving promising biomedical discoveries to commercialization… The new endowment will help Drexel enable the Philadelphia region to become a national hotbed of medical device development and build a global network of collaboration between academia and business.

This endowment is an extension of an existing Coulter-Drexel relationship, featuring projects that “have produced more than 40 full patent applications, three issued patents and one copyright registration,” including a wound monitor and a breast cancer screening device.
At the Philly Tech Week One Great Idea event from the Philadelphia Media Network, Ben Franklin Technology Partners President RoseAnn Rosenthal addressed the obstacle this program is meant to combat.
“Across the country we’ve seen a disruption in the innovation pipeline post-World War II,” she said. “We’ve gone from a time when there was a close connect between the technology and those who would develop it for market to now when innovation has moved back to the universities, without much of a market function, and we’ve seen big companies reduce their R&D.”
During the event, Coulter Project Director followed by Davood Tashayyod highlighted his work:
“This is an opportunity to create jobs and innovation that can go around the world but start here in Philadelphia,” he said.