Inside Stanford Medicine - May 23rd, 2011 - by Jonathan Rabinovitz
A $20 million endowment to support the translation of ideas that address unmet medical needs into treatments and devices that improve human health has been established in the Stanford University Department of Bioengineering, with support from the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation and the university.
The foundation provided a $10 million grant to create the endowment, with matching funds coming from the office of University President John Hennessy, PhD. The money will enable the Wallace H. Coulter Translational Research Grant Program at Stanford to continue in perpetuity.
A $20 million endowment to support the translation of ideas that address unmet medical needs into treatments and devices that improve human health has been established in the Department of Bioengineering, with support from the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation and the university.
“The Coulter Endowment fits perfectly at Stanford, with our shared commitments to innovation, entrepreneurship and the translation of scientific discoveries into treatments that prevent illness, relieve suffering and save lives,” said Hennessy. “With this endowment, we will vastly expand our ability to launch groundbreaking bioengineering research projects that could transform medical care around the world. We thank the Coulter Foundation for the generous support it has provided to establish this program.”
Stanford is one of nine universities that the Coulter Foundation awarded a grant of $5 million for the period from 2006 to 2011. The Coulter grant program at Stanford, which was established with this money, funded over this five-year period 25 projects, each having co-investigators from the bioengineering department and from a clinical department in the School of Medicine. The program helped to move toward the marketplace such new products as a blood test that could be an alternative to amniocentesis, a new type of surgical dressing that aims to prevent scarring, a drug that may improve cognition for people with Down syndrome and an ultra-cheap ventilator for hospitals in developing nations that can’t afford the current models.
“This program started out as a grand experiment to link the relatively new discipline of bioengineering to translational research,” said Sue Van, president of the foundation. “With the capabilities and financial sustainability of this endowment, Stanford is now a champion at the forefront of translational research and can systematically and successfully move innovation out of the university to benefit humanity.”
Elias Caro, vice president of technology development at the foundation, said, “As a member of the Coulter program, Stanford adopted the Coulter Process, an industry-like development process that includes a thorough commercialization analysis which assesses intellectual property, FDA requirements, reimbursement, critical milestones and clinical adoption. This attracted follow-on funding from venture capital and biomedical companies.”
With its unique position in Silicon Valley, Stanford has a rich history of supporting the process of doing basic research, developing its commercial applications and then helping to launch start-ups or collaborate with existing companies that produce and distribute the new technologies. The Coulter Process helped to advance Stanford’s translational efforts by providing a template for how to quickly and efficiently turn bioengineering research into medical products and clinical practices.
The Coulter grants work differently than grants from the National Institutes of Health and other federal research agencies. “This is more like business,” said Russ Altman, MD, PhD, chair of bioengineering. “The projects have quarterly milestones and can be killed by the oversight committee if the milestones are not met — this is not how academic grants usually go. There is a very strong emphasis on keeping focused on what is needed for successful transfer to professional management via a start-up or a license to an existing company.
“Funding for this sort of work is hard to get from the NIH, so the existence of a fund in perpetuity to support this kind of work is incredibly valuable,” said Altman, who holds the Guidant Professorship for Applied Biomedical Engineering.
Paul Yock, MD, director of the Stanford Biodesign Program and associate chair for translational research in the bioengineering department, noted that bioengineering faculty do a range of research from basic to translational and that the translational work is not only in medicine but also in environmental and energy technologies. “The Coulter program focuses on the portion of a faculty member’s research that is directed toward the development of clinical technologies and is designed to help reduce the barriers of getting these discoveries moved into patient care,” said Yock, who holds the Martha Meier Weiland Professorship in the School of Medicine.
The endowment will make it possible to extend the program to include bioengineering faculty who have not participated previously and may not think of their research in terms of commercial translation. “We are confident that this research can be in the portfolio of virtually the entire bioengineering faculty,” Altman said.
Twelve of the Stanford-Coulter projects have either spurred the formation of a start-up or had their technology licensed by an existing company, according to Ari Chaney, MBA, Coulter program director at Stanford and executive director of technology translation in the Stanford Biodesign Program. What’s more, after receiving Coulter money, the Stanford projects have gone on to receive $43 million in follow-up funds, with 49 percent from non-government sources, according to Stanford’s report to the foundation as of March.
Stanford, for instance, inked a co-exclusive worldwide license with two companies for techniques that could replace amniocentesis as a way to detect chromosomal and genetic disorders, such as Down syndrome. With support from a Coulter grant, bioengineering co-chair Stephen Quake, PhD, and his colleagues devised a way to count chromosomes using bits of fetal DNA in a pregnant woman’s blood. Quake, who holds the Lee Otterson Professorship in the School of Engineering, and his colleagues described the technique in October 2008 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Stanford has applied for patents on the methodology developed by the research team.
Another result of Coulter money is the startup Neodyne Biosciences, which was formed to commercialize a new way of treating wounds with a device that reduces scarring. The new approach is the product of work by surgery professors Geoffrey Gurtner, MD, and Michael Longaker, MD, in collaboration with Reinhold Dauskardt, PhD, from material science and engineering, and Yock from bioengineering. The company has licensed the technology from Stanford. (Gurtner is the Hagey Family Faculty Scholar in Stem Cell Research and Regenerative Medicine; Longaker is the Deane P. and Louise Mitchell Professor in the School of Medicine.)
Support from the Coulter program also paved the way for the discovery that an existing formerly marketed drug, when given at low doses, may improve cognition in people with Down syndrome. The research team, which received seed funding from Stanford’s SPARK program along with its Coulter grant, includes psychiatry and neurology professor Craig Garner, PhD; biology professor H. Craig Heller, PhD, who holds the Lorry I. Lokey/Business Wire Professorship; and bioengineering and psychiatry associate professor Karl Deisseroth, MD, PhD. The finding was licensed to a start-up company, Balance Therapeutics, which raised angel funding last year and a significant Series A financing earlier this year from institutional investors. (That latest round is not included in the total raised by Stanford’s Coulter projects as of its March report to the foundation.)
And still another Coulter grant led to a start-up called OneBreath, which is using a design developed at Stanford to make a low-cost ventilator, a device that helps to move air in and out of impaired lungs. While current ventilators cost upward of $40,000, this device is expected to sell for less than $1,000. That could benefit nations such as China that have rapidly growing populations and suffer frequent influenza pandemics, causing breathing difficulties for many patients.
“We are really pleased with our progress and results,” Chaney said. “We have achieved proof of concept for our prototype: the Coulter Process works in academia. We are very pleased to move forward in a permanent fashion.”
The bioengineering department is jointly operated by the School of Engineering and the School of Medicine.
Wallace H. Coulter (1913-98), benefactor of the Coulter Foundation, was a serial innovator and entrepreneur. He founded Coulter Corp. and continued to lead this global diagnostics company during its entire 40-year history. He revolutionized the practice of hematology and laboratory medicine and pioneered the fields of flow cytometry and monoclonal antibodies.
The Coulter Principle, or electronic sensing zone, was just one of his 82 patents. Its first application, the Coulter Counter, provided the first high-throughput, standardized method to count and size cells and particles as they flow through an aperture. It led to major advances in science, medicine and industry.