Source: Dal News
Author: Andrew Riley
Spencer Giffin, director in the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, receives the Deshpande Symposium Award for Technology Commercialization. (Provided photo)
On Thursday, June 16 at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Dalhousie received an international award for its work facilitating the transformation of student and researcher innovations into commercially viable products and services.
Dal Innovates staff accepted the prize at the annual Deshpande Symposium on Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Higher Education in Cleveland, Ohio. The event, founded in 2012 by the Massachusetts-based Deshpande Foundation, brings together global academics, policy planners, and practitioners to focus on accelerating innovation and entrepreneurship within higher education.
Dalhousie received the “Deshpande Symposium Award for Technology Commercialization,” along with fellow recipient the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras. The award recognizes leading universities globally for excellence in delivering programs that empower students and researchers to turn their research-based innovations into market-ready enterprises.
“It was a tremendous validation of the programs we’ve partnered to build at Dalhousie over the past several years to help students and researchers gain the skills and mindset to turn their ideas into innovations, and innovations into start-ups,” says Jeff Larsen, Dalhousie’s assistant vice-president, innovation and entrepreneurship. “It has been amazing to see our students and researchers learning how to commercialize research and start companies to make a positive impact in the world.”
Every step of the journey
Rafaela Andrade, a Dalhousie postdoctoral fellow and co-founder of the start-up Myomar Molecular says she attributes a good deal of her success to Dal Innovates.
“From the very early stage, when I had an idea and research findings and I didn’t know what to do with them, they guided me. They helped me see how I could elevate that idea to be a business. And then they gave me training on the business side that I didn’t have as a scientist,” says Dr. Andrade. “Finally, I got the tools and knowledge to apply to grant funding that allowed me to work full time on the company, which was key for its rapid development.”
Now the biochemist has a patent submitted for her diagnostic tool to identify early stages of muscle atrophy. She is about to announce an initial round of funding and will be going to market in the winter of 2024 with her health tech product that will give individuals and health care providers immediate access to patient information about muscle health from urine, without sending them to a lab for analysis.
Dr. Andrade completed the suite of Dal Innovates programming, beginning with Path2Innovation where she identified her product, then Lab2Market, which is based on the U.S. I-Corps program, where she tested market demand, and then Ready2Launch, which is based on MIT’s delta V student accelerator, where she gained the skills to run her business and seek financing.
She also leveraged the Emera IdeaHub – Dalhousie’s deep tech incubator – to build her prototype, and CDL– Atlantic, which is hosted at Dalhousie and part of the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) network. This objectives-based mentorship program for massively scalable, seed-stage, science- and technology-based companies is comprised of eleven universities, including the University of Toronto, University of Oxford, Georgia Tech, and University of Washington.
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