CU Innovators News

Venture Partners annual report highlights a record year for innovation

Daniel Corbin Leonard — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 13:06:32 +0000

Venture Partners annual report highlights a record year for innovation Daniel Corbin … Thu, 01/09/2025 - 06:06

FY 2023-24 was another tremendous year for innovation and entrepreneurship at the CU. University researchers, inventors and creators began working with Venture Partners at CU ��«��Ƶ to advance 144 breakthrough innovations, and 36 CU startups were launched through Venture Partners based on campus discoveries.

Off

Traditional

White

A vaccine against weight gain? It’s on the horizon

Daniel Corbin Leonard — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 18:53:52 +0000

A vaccine against weight gain? It’s on the horizon Daniel Corbin … Tue, 01/07/2025 - 11:53

New CU ��«��Ƶ research suggests a surprising tool that could help with weight loss: Exposure to beneficial bacteria. With assistance from Venture Partners, a new startup Kioga will pursue new microbe-based ingredients for preventing weight gain and promoting health.

Off

Traditional

White

Former CU ��«��Ƶ professor awarded National Medal of Technology and Innovation

Daniel Corbin Leonard — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 19:00:20 +0000

Former CU ��«��Ƶ professor awarded National Medal of Technology and Innovation Daniel Corbin … Mon, 01/06/2025 - 12:00

Daily Camera—President Joe Biden awarded former CU ��«��Ƶ professor Kristina Johnson with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation on Friday. Johnson’s research has led to 46 U.S. patents. Her optics inventions have enabled HDTV and modern 3D movies, which have been used in 25,000 theaters around the world and viewed by hundreds of millions of people.

Off

Traditional

White

Rising Startup Stars: Sristy Agrawal, co-founder and CEO of Mesa Quantum

Daniel Corbin Leonard — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 18:46:44 +0000

Rising Startup Stars: Sristy Agrawal, co-founder and CEO of Mesa Quantum Daniel Corbin … Mon, 12/23/2024 - 11:46

ColoradoBiz—Agrawal, 29, moved from India to Colorado to study quantum computation at CU in 2019. “��«��Ƶ, in general, has the most thriving quantum ecosystem in the world,” she says. The overwhelming focus on quantum computing, however, paved the way for Agrawal to co-found CU ��«��Ƶ Startup Mesa Quantum with Wale Lawal in early 2024.

Off

Traditional

White

Innovative Wind Turbine Control Earns Lucy Pao Prestigious IEEE Award

Daniel Corbin Leonard — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 19:46:42 +0000

Innovative Wind Turbine Control Earns Lucy Pao Prestigious IEEE Award Daniel Corbin … Thu, 12/19/2024 - 12:46

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute—Model Predictive Control (MPC) is an established control technique that is popular in the general control systems community. The MPC approach could have significant impacts on how wind turbines are controlled, not only improving their efficiency, but also reducing structural stress on the turbines and extending their lifetimes.

Off

Traditional

White

Kristi Anseth recognized with international VinFuture Prize for Women Innovators

Daniel Corbin Leonard — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 18:17:41 +0000

Kristi Anseth recognized with international VinFuture Prize for Women Innovators Daniel Corbin … Fri, 12/06/2024 - 11:17

CU ��«��Ƶ College of Engineering and Applied Science—Kristi Anseth, a Distinguished Professor and Tisone Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, has been awarded the prestigious VinFuture Special Prize for Women Innovators in recognition of her pioneering research in tissue engineering. Winners were selected from nearly 1,500 scientific nominations spanning more than 80 countries and territories worldwide.

Off

Traditional

White

CU Engineering advances innovation through startup success

Daniel Corbin Leonard — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 18:37:51 +0000

CU Engineering advances innovation through startup success Daniel Corbin … Mon, 12/02/2024 - 11:37

CU ��«��Ƶ College of Engineering & Applied Science—The College of Engineering and Applied Science continues to establish itself as a leader in innovation, with 22 startups emerging from its research labs in the past fiscal year. This achievement reflects the college's commitment to translating transformative research into solutions that address real-world challenges.

Off

Traditional

White

New PhD research area allows students, faculty to explore engineering design in a wider context

Daniel Corbin Leonard — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 17:50:03 +0000

New PhD research area allows students, faculty to explore engineering design in a wider context Daniel Corbin … Wed, 11/27/2024 - 10:50

CU ��«��Ƶ College of Engineering and Applied Science—Students are constantly designing tools and technologies. Faculty members are launching successful startups on the backs of their own designs. In just the past two years, Venture Partners at CU ��«��Ƶ has supported ten new startups featuring inventions designed by Mechanical Engineering faculty and students.

Off

Traditional

White

SomaLogic, spun out of the Gold Lab at CU ��«��Ƶ, revolutionized protein discovery methods to provide insights into disease discovery and treatment

Daniel Corbin Leonard — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 20:38:57 +0000

SomaLogic, spun out of the Gold Lab at CU ��«��Ƶ, revolutionized protein discovery methods to provide insights into disease discovery and treatment Daniel Corbin … Wed, 10/30/2024 - 14:38

Heather Hansen

Founded by CU ��«��Ƶ Professor Larry Gold in 2000, SomaLogic revolutionized protein measurement by developing a faster, cost-effective process to monitor the vast number of proteins in the human body. Gold’s discoveries and work at CU ��«��Ƶ ultimately led to the creation of three spinout companies and a significant impact on global healthcare research and diagnostics.

Like most groundbreaking biotechnology companies, SomaLogic formed around a problem to solve—how to precisely measure the huge number of proteins in the human body. In 2000, when Larry Gold founded the company, measuring proteins was a time-consuming, costly and flawed process reliant on antibodies which are often not specific or sensitive enough detection tools.

Larry Gold, PhD

Gold, who began teaching in the ��«��Ƶ’s Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology (MCDB) department in 1970 (and served as its chair from 1988 to 1992), set out to do what no one else in the world was doing at the time—measure proteins more simply, cheaply and quickly. “My whole career at CU in MCDB, for 50 plus years, I have cared about measuring proteins,” said Gold.

Measuring proteins is so important because they’re the building blocks of life. The human body has at least 20,000 different proteins—and many more variants—working together in a complicated choreography. For example, collagen is a protein that structures skin, bones and teeth, while hemoglobin carries oxygen in blood. Proteins are also key to a well-functioning immune system, catalyze reactions in the body, and function as critical messengers within and between cells.

The ability to identify and count proteins is essential to biomedical research. Quantifying protein concentrations can help measure the presence and progression of diseases like cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s. Proteins are also often the targets of therapeutics—like aspirin for a headache—because of all the biochemical processes they carry out and their ability to intervene in pathologies with high specificity.

At the start, Gold’s lab could measure roughly 70 proteins by working long hours and sticking with the process despite occasional setbacks. For decades, said Gold, “From morning to night, seven days a week, oftentimes all night, I pipetted the same experiment thousands of times,” he said. “I don’t get bored doing the same thing over and over as long as we’re learning stuff—and we were.”

Gold said advancing their knowledge of proteins little by little while enjoying the camaraderie of life in the lab made long hours and ‘failed’ experiments tolerable, even enjoyable. “You can’t get upset when an experiment doesn't work, it’s a continuing, iterative process,” he said. “And I was doing it with good people–and that’s fun.”

Their process was cutting-edge at the time, but Gold knew that to crack the code on proteins, they’d need to be able to measure more and faster. That mission was the driving force in founding SomaLogic. “The tech for what we wanted to do didn’t exist, so we had to invent it on the spot,” Gold told an entrepreneur forum in 2015. “The basic idea was right about what we wanted to do, but the technology was harder than we thought,” he said.

Inventing those tools ultimately would take a decade and $200 million.

Imagining a bold future

In a way, proteins are like locks that Gold and his team were trying to find keys to. That matchmaking effort began decades ago, leading to an underlying innovation that fueled three spinouts and countless ongoing applications.

In the late 1980s, Gold and his team at CU ��«��Ƶ, including PhD student Craig Tuerk, made a discovery that led to that original innovation. They were developing a technique to identify molecules that would selectively bind to other compounds (based on a piece of ribonucleic acid, or RNA, which Tuerk was studying).

Gold recalled the day when—two years into an experiment he’d asked Tuerk to do—they discovered they were onto something big. It was 1989, the day before Thanksgiving, and Tuerk came running out of the darkroom where he’d been working. “That afternoon, it was clear to us he had done something that had lots of possibilities for the future in biotech, and we covered a whiteboard with every idea we had,” said Gold.

It was a watershed moment that would change the biotech industry significantly. “Craig and I shared the most wonderful moment possible for scientists: we imagined a future in which RNAs were ‘shapes, not tapes’ or ‘strings, not things’ and were useful in the same way that monoclonal antibodies are useful,” Gold wrote in a 2015 article in the Journal of Molecular Evolution.

In the process, the group isolated the first-known aptamers, a class of molecules with the unique binding ability—the keys—they were looking for. Then, they devised a system called SELEX (Systematic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential Enrichment), which could generate aptamers reliably and efficiently.

That discovery and development revolutionized biological research and medical diagnostics with wide-ranging applications from biomarker detection (indicating diseases like cancer and viral infections) to targeted therapies with fewer side effects.

From CU ��«��Ƶ to the world

The Path to Commercialization

When a university startup is created, it is the culmination of years of research and significant work by the founders to build a compelling company vision, strategy and business model. The team at Venture Partners is here to help with each step along the way, including:

intellectual property (IP) services,
entrepreneurial training through the I-Corps^TM Hub West,
a network of industry mentors,
funding through the Lab Venture Challenge,
the Ascent Deep Tech Accelerator,
fast and simple IP licensing through the Licensing with EASE^® program,
and many other resources.

Remarkable biotechnology breakthroughs don’t happen often, and even fewer enter the marketplace—and with such exceptional results. But Gold seems to have a knack for bringing them to light, combining decades of experience with a passion for inquiry. “You have to do the mundane work, but you also have to try to ask big questions, too,” he said, “Most people don't do that because they're afraid; our culture, in general, breeds a fear of failure.”

But to make the big discoveries, Gold said scientists have to take chances and cling to small victories in the process. “You should take some shots that are slightly ridiculous,” he said. “And enjoy all these little moments along the way where you learn something. The business of science for me is incredibly fun, and so that makes it easy to do for a long time.”

Since Gold and colleagues developed the SELEX platform, various academic and biopharma partners have also used it to develop new diagnostic tests, discover new drugs, accelerate their translation to clinical practice and reveal a deeper understanding of basic human biology and disease. In one such collaboration, Imperial College London is using a SomaLogic platform to analyze tens of thousands of biological samples as part of an investigation into how lifestyle, diet, genetic, metabolic and other factors affect the development of serious illnesses.

Soon after developing SELEX, Gold co-founded and served as co-director of research at Synergen, Inc., a biotechnology company later acquired by Amgen, Inc. and he founded NeXagen, Inc. (later called NeXstar Pharmaceuticals, Inc.), which merged with Gilead Sciences, Inc. in 1999. One major accomplishment of NeXstar centered on Macugen, a drug used to treat age-related macular degeneration and only the second-ever RNA aptamer to gain FDA approval.

Innovation that keeps on giving

Recognizing there was still work to be done in developing accessible diagnostics, Gold launched SomaLogic in 2000 where he served as CEO and chairman. He knew that focusing on proteomics—the field of measuring proteins—would be tough but, he wrote, “We also believed (and I continue to believe) that medical diagnostics was not as useful for patients and healthcare as it had to be, and that personalized medicine would depend on genomics and proteomics (and other ‘omics’ technologies).”

Based on the original SELEX technology developed at CU ��«��Ƶ, SomaLogic pioneered the development of proteomics diagnostics and experiments. That is, they set out to create arrays of aptamers (keys) to fit thousands of proteins (locks) simultaneously to make disease discovery as simple as possible. Their unique “SOMAmers” can distinguish between nearly identical proteins and their SomaScan Assay is the first and only platform enabling 11,000 protein measurements from a tiny fluid sample.

Spinning three companies out of a single innovation developed at CU ��«��Ƶ was an incredible feat, according to Bryn Rees, associate vice chancellor for research and innovation and managing director of Venture Partners at CU ��«��Ƶ. “Larry was a pioneer and did this at a time when universities really weren’t set up to support that,” said Rees. “It was transformative. None of the whole innovation ecosystem that we currently have would exist without Larry doing that. The whole thing is a major CU ��«��Ƶ success story.”

Venture Partners, the commercialization arm for CU ��«��Ƶ, now has myriad programs to help would-be entrepreneurs launch their innovations into the world. “Fast forward to today where it’s a wholesale culture change, and the university really understands how intertwined the mission of the university is, with folks like Larry being able to spin their work out and impact so many, in his case, patients and labs around the world,” said Rees.

In 2021, SomaLogic went public, and in January 2024, it merged with Standard BioTools Inc., which uses next-generation technologies to transform scientific discoveries into better patient outcomes.

The sky’s the limit when thinking about how the discoveries originally made at CU ��«��Ƶ will continue to be used to improve healthcare, Gold wrote. “…the future for applications of aptamers will be limited only by our imaginations…”

Founded by CU ��«��Ƶ Professor Larry Gold in 2000, SomaLogic revolutionized protein measurement by developing a faster, cost-effective process to monitor the vast number of proteins in the human body.

Off

Traditional

White

CU ��«��Ƶ teams among first winners of the NSF-funded Colorado-Wyoming Climate Resilience Engine

Daniel Corbin Leonard — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 18:01:49 +0000

CU ��«��Ƶ teams among first winners of the NSF-funded Colorado-Wyoming Climate Resilience Engine Daniel Corbin … Tue, 10/22/2024 - 12:01

This article was initially published at innosphereventures.org.

Ready to explore opportunities in research translation? Venture Partners at CU ��«��Ƶ brings the university’s world-class researchers with the business, startup and entrepreneurial communities to translate groundbreaking solutions into economic and social impact.

Explore Opportunities and Events

Over the past two months, the Colorado-Wyoming Climate Resilience Engine has been focused on identifying and supporting groundbreaking climate resilience projects across the region. This included launching the first round of investments in Research and Development and Translation/Startup projects with funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Regional Innovation Engines program. Interdisciplinary, collaborative teams from across the region’s leading universities and startup companies answered the Engine’s request for proposals with an overwhelming and diverse range of climate resilience solutions.

Governors Jared Polis of Colorado and Mark Gordon of Wyoming collaborated to announce the recipients of the inaugural grant program by the CO-WY Climate Resilience Engine. This partnership signifies a new phase in the joint efforts of the two states to create climate resilience solutions that safeguard communities, encourage innovation, and stimulate economic development.

“Colorado is leading the way in addressing climate change and using innovative solutions to become more resilient in the face of its impact. I’m thankful for Wyoming and Governor Gordon’s partnership and openness to work together to drive innovation, strengthen public-private partnerships, and make the region more climate resilient. These projects will help secure our water future, protect Coloradans from wildfire dangers, and protect our air and I am excited to see them in action,” said Governor Polis.

“When Wyoming joined the engine, we were focused on identifying and addressing specific Wyoming issues, including the impacts of droughts and wildfires,” Governor Gordon said. “Wyoming and Colorado may not be in alignment on many issues, but I will always support efforts within each of our states to benefit our citizens.”

The CO-WY Engine received nearly 50 proposals across two areas: R&D, which focuses on catalyzing the commercialization of university-based projects, and Translation/Startups, which supports bringing early-stage commercial solutions to scale. The winning projects address key issues in climate resilience in our region, including water security, wildfire prediction and response, extreme weather modeling, soil carbon sequestration, and methane emissions mitigation. These projects build on and strengthen critical capabilities in advanced sensing and data science, positioning Colorado and Wyoming at the forefront of innovation nationally. These projects demonstrate the power of public-private partnerships and investments in innovation to drive meaningful impact.

For more information about future proposal requests and opportunities with the CO-WY Climate Resilience Engine visit co-wyengine.org.

��«��Ƶ Winners of the CO-WY Climate Resilience Engine Request for Proposals

Use-Inspired Funding

Wildfire Risk and Prediction
Project title: Mapping Vulnerability: Assessing the Built Environment’s Susceptibility to Wildfires through AI and Big Data.
Principal investigator: Virginia Iglesias, PhD (Earth Lab, CIRES)
Lead institution: ��«��Ƶ
Key partners: CoreLogic, CyVerse

Translational Funding

Complex Earth Sensing/Soil Carbon Capture Data & Analytics
Project title: Next-Gen Soil Monitoring: Wireless Printed Sensors for Agriculture
Principal investigator: Elliot Strand (BEEM Lab, College of Engineering and Applied Science)
Company name: Page Technologies
Key partners: Syngenta Group, University of Wyoming, 3 Rocks Ranch, Colorado State University, Growing Gardens, Meshcomm Engineering

CU ��«��Ƶ teams are among the first winners of the NSF-funded Colorado-Wyoming Climate Resilience Engine, which supports innovative climate resilience projects across the region1. This initiative, backed by the U.S. National Science Foundation, aims to address key issues like water security, wildfire prediction, and extreme weather modeling through interdisciplinary collaboration.

Off

Traditional

White

Elliot Strand (photo: CU ��«��Ƶ)

CU Innovators News

Venture Partners annual report highlights a record year for innovation

Off

A vaccine against weight gain? It’s on the horizon

Off

Former CU ��«����Ƶ professor awarded National Medal of Technology and Innovation

Off

Rising Startup Stars: Sristy Agrawal, co-founder and CEO of Mesa Quantum

Off

Innovative Wind Turbine Control Earns Lucy Pao Prestigious IEEE Award

Off

Kristi Anseth recognized with international VinFuture Prize for Women Innovators

Off

CU Engineering advances innovation through startup success

Off

New PhD research area allows students, faculty to explore engineering design in a wider context

Off

SomaLogic, spun out of the Gold Lab at CU ��«����Ƶ, revolutionized protein discovery methods to provide insights into disease discovery and treatment

Imagining a bold future

From CU ��«����Ƶ to the world

Innovation that keeps on giving

Off

CU ��«����Ƶ teams among first winners of the NSF-funded Colorado-Wyoming Climate Resilience Engine

��«����Ƶ Winners of the CO-WY Climate Resilience Engine Request for Proposals

Use-Inspired Funding

Translational Funding

Off

Former CU ��«��Ƶ professor awarded National Medal of Technology and Innovation

SomaLogic, spun out of the Gold Lab at CU ��«��Ƶ, revolutionized protein discovery methods to provide insights into disease discovery and treatment

From CU ��«��Ƶ to the world

CU ��«��Ƶ teams among first winners of the NSF-funded Colorado-Wyoming Climate Resilience Engine

��«��Ƶ Winners of the CO-WY Climate Resilience Engine Request for Proposals