Purdue Innovates funds advances in ag biotechnology, cancer treatments and fiber optics

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Purdue University researchers in the College of Pharmacy and College of Science have received $124,984 from the Trask Innovation Fund to develop Purdue-owned intellectual property for commercial use.

The innovations are in the areas of agricultural biotechnology, cancer treatments, and fiber optics and electronics.

The fund is managed by the Purdue Innovates Incubator, which provides programming for the Purdue University community to ideate, refine and support their solutions. Funding recipients can receive up to $50,000 for their initial project; they may reapply a maximum of three times to receive up to an aggregate cap of $100,000 to support the same technology.

The fall 2024 Trask Innovation Fund recipients, their projects and award amounts are:

Stanton Gelvin; College of Science, Purdue Center for Plant Biology and Purdue Institute for Cancer Research; “Generating and detecting genome edits in non-transgenic plants”; $50,000

Gelvin is the H. Edwin Umbarger Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences. He leads a project to develop a system that identifies plants with putatively edited genomes without CRISPR, or clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, gene integration.

He and his team also have developed patent-pending novel Agrobacterium strains that transfer DNA to plants but do not integrate it. This means the strains do not make genetically modified transgenic plants, which are highly regulated in most countries.

“Transgene-free genome editing is one of the Holy Grails of modern plant biotechnology,” Gelvin said. “Our combined technologies will allow agricultural biotechnology companies to generate and identify transgene-free edited plants quickly and efficiently.”

Traditional Agrobacterium strains deliver transfer DNA, or T-DNA, into plants, including crops, and integrate it into the plants’ genome. This can create a plant that expresses traits such as improved drought resistance or better nutritional content.

“However, T-DNA is permanently integrated into the plant genome, creating plants labeled ‘transgenic,’” Gelvin said. “Transgenic plants can be either highly regulated or outlawed, depending on the country.”

Traditional methods to detect genome-edited plants may require generating thousands of plants and testing each for genome edits, which is expensive and time-consuming. The Trask funding will allow Gelvin and his team to develop a technology to identify plant tissue that initially received the CRISPR genes but may not have integrated them.

“Our combined technologies will allow scientists to generate and identify transgene-free edited plants quickly and efficiently,” Gelvin said. “They will no longer need to introduce CRISPR editing reagents into the plant genome, then eliminate them to meet regulatory requirements. Such CRISPR transgene elimination is time-consuming, expensive and difficult for long generation-time plants (e.g., trees) and plants that are not usually sexually propagated such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, bananas, cacao and many biofuel crops.”

Chen-Lung Hung; College of Science and Purdue Quantum Science and Engineering Institute; “Universal fiber-to-nanophotonic circuit interface for optical communication and computation”; $24,984

Hung is an associate professor of physics and astronomy. He leads a project to develop a patent-pending novel design and fabrication process that achieves greater than 95% fiber-to-photonic circuit optical coupling efficiency in silicon photonic circuits for quantum photonics.

He said chip-scale nanophotonics and laser devices have applications including lidar (light detection and ranging), photonic circuits-based sensors and biosensors, and quantum photonic circuits for quantum communication and photonic quantum computing.

“Achieving an efficient, near-perfect optical fiber interface for nanophotonic circuits is extremely important for such demanding applications,” Hung said. “The interface enables low optical power consumption, high bandwidth, high optical sensitivity, and even high quantum efficiency and fidelity for single-photon operations.”

He said building an efficient fiber interface is challenging due to the significant mismatch between fiber optical modes and the small size of nanophotonic waveguide modes.

“To date, the most advanced solutions for fiber-to-chip interfaces require rather complicated nanophotonic designs and fabrication procedures that are not fully compatible with standard semiconductor fabrication processes, known as CMOS,” Hung said. “This has seriously limited the device yield, cost-effectiveness and general fabrication applicability.”

Hung said the Trask funding will be used to develop and demonstrate modularized fiber-to-chip optical coupling to common commercial photonic circuits fabricated on standard wafers.

“We plan to build the ‘USB connector’ between the optical fiber internet and optical circuits,” he said. “This development will significantly improve the commercialization value of our invention.”

Sandro Matosevic; College of Pharmacy, Purdue Institute for Cancer Research and Purdue Institute for Drug Discovery; “Multispecific engagers for immunotherapy of brain tumors”; $50,000

Matosevic is an associate professor of industrial and molecular pharmaceutics. He leads a team that develops patent-pending antibody-based immunotherapies called natural killer cell engagers (NKCEs) to treat glioblastoma. NK cells are a type of white blood cell that have granules with enzymes to kill tumor cells or virus-infected cells.

Glioblastoma is a brain tumor for which chemotherapy, surgery and most, if not all, immunotherapies don’t work. The survival rate after diagnosis has been at 15-18 months for the past three decades.

Matosevic’s NKCEs improve upon traditional methods to recruit and activate NK cells to fight cancer. They tether NK cells and cancer cells together, which leads to a significant improvement in immune cell efficacy against tumors and a comparative reduction in tumor cell resistance by immune cells. The NKCEs can be administered alongside cell-based therapies for people with glioblastoma.

Matosevic said, “Our NK cell engagers can be readily manufactured using known reagents and administered off-the-shelf to patients alongside autologous or allogeneic cell-based products without limitations on clinical use.”

The goal of the Trask-funded project is to support the collection of preclinical data about the NKCEs.

“This includes the biodistribution, toxicity and efficacy of the NKCEs and their manufacture,” Matosevic said. “These are necessary to prepare them for an Investigational New Drug application with the Food and Drug Administration, which is filed before clinical trials are authorized in humans.”

Why the Trask awards matter

Matt Dressler, Purdue Innovates Incubator’s funds manager, said the Trask Innovation Fund awards support Purdue researchers through the “valley of death.”

“This is the time between the creation of a new innovation and its adoption in the marketplace. Sometimes it takes years for an innovation to garner industry attention,” he said.

Dressler said Trask funding addresses challenges that Purdue faculty face during this time, including technology obsolescence and frustration due to lack of progress.

“The funding can address those challenges as Purdue faculty develop a discovery into a viable marketplace product,” he said. “The fund complements several other Purdue Innovates resources provided to university inventors and entrepreneurs.”

Previous awardees have used the funding to support students, conduct tests, generate data and develop prototypes. This additional level of validation of the research makes it more attractive to companies that want to license it and bring it to the marketplace.

About Purdue Innovates Incubator

Purdue Innovates Incubator is the front door to the rich ecosystem of programs and services designed to help early-stage startups take their next step. Programs provide settings for cohort work and one-on-one consultations. Content includes clarifying problems from the customer’s perspective, developing a business model, conducting customer discovery interviews, team building, determining regulatory pathways and legal structures, and more. Purdue alumni and community members interested in becoming mentors are invited to contact the Incubator team.

About Purdue University

Purdue University is a public research university leading with excellence at scale. Ranked among top 10 public universities in the United States, Purdue discovers, disseminates and deploys knowledge with a quality and at a scale second to none. More than 107,000 students study at Purdue across multiple campuses, locations and modalities, including more than 58,000 at our main campus in West Lafayette and Indianapolis. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue’s main campus has frozen tuition 13 years in a row. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap — including its comprehensive urban expansion, the Mitch Daniels School of Business, Purdue Computes and the One Health initiative — at https://www.purdue.edu/president/strategic-initiatives.