Smart Walls Construction, LLC. wins SBIR Phase II Grant

InteliSpark client Smart Walls Contruction, LLC. has been awarded a $749,057 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a Phase II SBIR project, “telescopic structural flood walls”. The research project is aimed to develop and commercialize an innovative extendable/retractable telescopic structural wall for flood protection.

The development of these telescopic structural flood walls will allow for more resilient infrastructure in flood-prone areas, such as coastal cities and riverine communities. The World Bank has estimated that 50 billion dollars a year is spent worldwide, towards measures to mitigate flooding hazards. Specifically, in the US, 7.9 billion dollars are spent in flood damages and causing 82 fatalities per year, making it to be one of the costliest and deadliest natural hazards. Smart Walls Construction has addressed a challenge faced by city officials and the engineering community by providing a solution of hazard-resilient infrastructure for populations near bodies of water.

Smart Walls Construction’s technology will provide a paradigm shift for the prefabricated concrete industry. Their product will employ a unique concept where structural boxes can be deployed telescopically to withstand forces from external sources, and then return to a retracted position. With the Phase II SBIR grant, they will now be able to focus on assessing the technical features of the walls, based on lead-off customer sites. Smart Walls Constructions will conduct studies on the local and overall structural responses of the walls and the functionality of the mechanical components. They will also create analytical and numerical models, validated by testing on specific components. From there, full-scale models will be tested against storm-surges, hurricane, tsunami, slow-rising waters, and debris forces. Smart Walls Construction will then be able to provide the necessary framework for design guidelines for theses telescopic structural flood walls to be built virtually anywhere flood protection is needed.

Vishwa Robotics wins Phase II SBIR Grant

InteliSpark client Vishwa Robotics has been awarded a Phase II Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Grant worth $449,437. This Phase II Grant is for their project, “Development of a Novel Transmission for Helicopter Applications” which focuses on developing a novel gear box for rotorcrafts.

The US Army utilizes a wide variety of vehicles across ground and air platforms, where mechanical transmissions are used to transmit power from the engine to the drive shaft. The gears are used to create a torque and speed conversion with mechanical contact between the gear teeth surfaces. Lubrication is necessary for these vehicles, to create a protective film between rolling and sliding surfaces and provide sufficient cooling to prevent failure. Resultantly, mechanical contact transmissions are highly vulnerable to loss of lubrication events and require regular maintenance for their lubrication system. Specifically, there is a need for a solution to reduce mechanical contacts within helicopter transmissions to alleviate the lubrication loss related to catastrophic failures.

Vishwa Robotics has proposed a gear box for rotorcrafts, which results in simplification of the overall structure with substantial reduction in GTOW by circumventing the lubrication package. Focusing on helicopter rotor mechanisms, they have enhanced these structures by removing the lubrication system and reduction of different mechanical frictional tribological mechanism. This allows for increase in transmission life expectancy, robustness, and a dramatic increase in reliability. Vishwa Robotics’ concept can enable future scaling up to the power class of a utility, attack, or cargo class helicopter.

Ecolectro, Inc. wins Phase I SBIR Grant

InteliSpark client Ecolectro, Inc. has been awarded a Phase I Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grant worth $225,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The grant is for the SBIR project “Ultrathin Polymer Electrolyte Composites with Exceptional Conductivity, Mechanical Strength and Chemical Durability.”  The goal of the SBIR project is to produce polymer composites that enable commercialization of alkaline electrochemical devices, such fuel cells and electrolyzers.

The use of fuel cell technologies will help preserve the environment, mitigate climate change, decreasing our carbon footprint and securing renewable energy supply. Electrolyzers are an increasingly attractive method of producing ultrapure hydrogen, an essential chemical feedstock and fuel.

Currently, widespread adoption of these technologies is prevented by the high system costs, which are driven by the platinum catalysts. Alkaline exchange membranes (AEMs) will be less expensive to produce and recyclable at the end of lifetime, unlike the existing polymer electrolytes, further decreasing the cost of devices. Producing commercially viable AEMs enables the widespread deployment of fuel cell and electrolyzer systems by making the technology economically competitive with incumbent fossil fuel based energy sources.

This SBIR Phase I project proposes to produce polymer electrolyte composites that meet the stringent performance criteria for a commercially viable AEM, including durability, hydroxide conductivity and mechanical strength under alkaline operating conditions. The combination of our unique polymer composition and a structural support that maximizes conductivity without losing mechanical strength, is a crucial milestone for the commercialization of our technology.

Neurovascular Diagnostics, Inc. wins Phase I SBIR Grant

InteliSpark client Neurovascular Diagnostics, Inc. has been awarded a Phase I Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grant worth $224,032 from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The grant is for the SBIR project “A Blood-Based Test to Identify Patients with Intracranial Aneurysm.”  The goal of the SBIR project is to develop a novel blood diagnostic to detect unruptured intracranial aneurysms (IA) in asymptomatic patients.

About 2-5% of the U.S. population (about 6-17 million Americans) have an unruptured IA, and these individuals are largely asymptomatic and thus unaware of the potential danger they are in. Currently, there are not any good screening tools to identify patients with unruptured IAs. Due to inefficient technology, about 30,000 Americans suffer IA rupture each year without warning. The diagnostic screening technology developed in this project will identify people who have unruptured IAs, enabling patients to be monitored and receive preventative treatment, which can drastically reduce the rate of rupture. This project aims to develop a molecular diagnostic to detect biomarkers of unruptured aneurysms using the transcriptomes of circulating neutrophils. Preliminary results have shown that circulating neutrophils isolated from blood samples could be used to predict unruptured IA presence with 80% accuracy.

This Phase I project will increase the sample size of the previous discovery and validation cohorts to give more confidence in the discovered biomarkers as well as increase the accuracy of the proposed diagnostic.

Senti Biosciences, Inc. wins Phase I SBIR Grant

InteliSpark client Senti Biosciences, Inc. has been awarded a Phase I Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grant worth $225,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The grant is for the SBIR project “An Engineering Platform for Adaptive Medicines.”  The goal of the SBIR project is to develop a cell-based platform technology that can sense inflammatory sites and respond by producing anti-inflammatory factors to treat autoimmune diseases.

“There are more than 80 types of autoimmune disease with more than 23.5 million Americans affected. Autoimmune diseases are the number one cause of morbidity for women in the U.S., and one of the top 10 causes of death for women under 65 years old.” Current treatments for autoimmune diseases are effective for some patients, but a majority either are not receptive or become unmanageable. Standard drugs result in systemic immune suppression, which can cause severe and chronic side effects. There is a substantial market need for anti-inflammatory drugs that can act locally at the site of inflammation, and deliver the "right dose at the right time" depending on the severity of the flare. If successful, the adaptive cell therapy platform being developed in this proposal will serve as the basis for a next-generation therapy to existing biologics.

The substantial technical and clinical progress made in recent years in synthetic biology and cell therapies is enabling development of this type of product. The goal is to design and optimize synthetic gene circuits to program cells to locally sense inflammatory signals such as TNFalpha and release anti-TNF drugs. The plan is to introduce these circuits into adult stem cells that have been used safely in numerous clinical trials against autoimmune diseases and have a well-established commercial development path. The engineered cells will be tested in culture to show input/output response to different levels of TNFalpha, and then tested in mouse models of disease. If successful, lead candidates will be further developed in a Phase II application.

SensoDx, LLC. wins Phase II STTR $1M Award

InteliSpark client SensoDx, LLC. has been awarded a Phase II Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grant worth $999,998.25. The grant is for the STTR project “Field Drug Identification Kit.”  The goal of the STTR project is that the proposed product is a microfluidics point-of-care (POC) cartridge, in conjunction with a miniaturized instrument, that together permit real-time detection of illicit drugs in the field.

 Illicit drug trafficking has increasingly been used to fund terrorist groups since the end of the Cold War. As illicit drugs increasingly finance terrorism, soldiers in the U.S. Army are increasingly playing an active role in identifying these drugs in difficult and demanding environments.

Over the past decade, the John T. McDevitt laboratory located at New York University has pioneered the development of a series of powerful programmable bio-nano-chip sensor systems that are suitable for a wide range of chemical, biological and cellular assays. Developed initially as “electronic taste chips”, these mini-sensor systems are fashioned with the same micro-fabrication methods used by the microelectronics industry. These devices are created such that they can be reprogrammed for new applications in an efficient manner, while at the same time yielding sensors with strong analytical performance characteristics.

Programmable Bio-Nano-Chip (p-BNC) technology that will permit detection of illicit drugs in the field. During Phase II, SensoDx plans to: a) expand the classes of drugs that it targets from three to five, by the addition of drugs representative of a Cathinine and a hallucinogen; and b) increase the panel size for the detectable drugs from three to eight drugs. The ultimate goal is to detect all eight drugs in a single test that takes less than 5 minutes.

RemPhos Technologies LLC Wins Phase II $1M Grant

InteliSpark client RemPhos Technologies, LLC. has been awarded a Phase II Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grant worth $999,742.97. The grant is for the SBIR project “Miniature, point-of-care device for establishing sterile connections in combat environments.”  The goal of this SBIR research is to develop a portable novel UVC LED light-source device for medical catheters that effectively disinfects the luminal surface and luer connectors in a safe, nonchemical, low temperature fashion without the need for consumables like Curos™ caps, in less than 2 minutes.

RemPhos developed a simple, hand-held, portable and reusable high intensity UVC light source (LED/housing + optics + cooling + low voltage power/control) for automated simultaneous disinfection of catheter lumens and luer connectors. The assembly directs the emitted UVC light in the 250-280nm range at ~20 mW, focusing the energy with a 50 mm focal length into the lumen via a proprietary optical method. Their data and data from a few other groups have shown that UV light can indeed sterilize catheters.

The product being created in this project a portable novel UVC LED light-source device for medical catheters that effectively disinfects the luminal surface and luer connectors in a safe, non-chemical, low temperature fashion. This will enable physicians to quickly guarantee their catheter equipment is sterile before using it, no matter where they might be. If successful, this system will be of tremendous use to medics and combat lifesavers, and ultimately increase their ability to save lives on the battlefield. The proposed UV disinfection product fits perfectly into existing operations and in their mission of using our talented engineers to design LED lighting solutions that will have a positive effect on people’s lives.

The vision for the company over the next five years is to continue growth in existing markets, while also expanding our product lines into additional markets, particularly the medical space.

Apama Medical, Inc. acquired by Boston Scientific (NYSE:BSX)

Apama Medical was acquired by Boston Scientific in deal that is worth $300 million for its’ radiofrequency balloon catheter system designed to treat atrial fibrillation.  InteliSpark’s predecessor (Centurion Technology) helped Apama Medical secure $1.2 million in National Science Foundation Phase I, Phase II, and Phase IIB funding.  This funding, which began in 2010, played a critical role in the early stage development of Apama’s novel RF balloon catheter system.

Apama’s novel RF balloon is a single-shot, multi-electrode device designed to combine the benefits of RF point-by-point and balloon-based ablation approaches, the company said, claiming the system delivers differentiated energy levels and shorter procedure times. The system features an incorporated digital camera with LED lights and sensing electrodes for real-time visualization of the procedure and catheter electrode contact.

The deal, which Boston Scientific announced last Monday, includes an initial $175 million in cash up-front from the Marlborough, Mass.-based company and an additional $125 million in contingent payments between 2018 and 2020 based on clinical and regulatory milestones.

Adhesys Medical, Inc. Wins $1.3M Award with SOCOM

InteliSpark client Adhesys Medical, Inc. has won a $1,329,609 contract with the United States Special Operations Command for the project, “Novel Medical Adhesive and Applicator for Field Use”.

Adhesys Medical proposes the continued research and development of MARglue, a polyurethane-based adhesive, designed to save lives in the operating room and on the battlefield. In its intended use, it will allow casualties to survive until they reach a Medical Treatment Facility (MTF) by controlling hemorrhage.

There are two pieces of technology that are integral to the final product: the adhesive properties and the applicator device.  Through this work we will expand our knowledge on the properties of our already developed adhesive in order to optimize it’s use in medical emergencies to save lives.  We will also work with military personnel to develop a field-ready, easy to use applicator suitable for treatment of traumatic wound on the battlefield.  Through the continued research and development of this technology Adhesys Medical seeks to improve the survival rates for casualties during their transition from the battlefield to an MTF.

Major blood loss with hemorrhagic shock is one of the leading causes of fatalities in military operations. Of the potentially survivable deaths sustained during Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring recorded between 2001 and 2011, 91% were associated with hemorrhage.  Because most battlefield casualties die of their injuries before reaching an MTF, there is a great need for new technologies that mitigate hemorrhage.  Furthermore, there were 1,645 battery-injury major limb amputations between Oct. 7, 2001 and June 1, 2015 in U.S. operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. Many of these amputations may have been prevented with improved proximal hemorrhage control.

MARglue is an excellent first-aid-device for military emergencies. This adhesive will stop bleeding within 60 seconds, working independent of the body’s own clotting mechanism, through the use of quickly assembled and easy to use applicator. MARglue can be applied directly into wound cavities, and as the cavity is filled, the glue closes injured vessels and attaches to the surrounding tissue. For traumas resulting into limb bleeding, MARglue can be applied directly on the area. Due to its high viscosity, it is not easily washed away by excess blood. Deep wounds, like those resulting from a bullet, can be treated by applying the adhesive directly into the point of entry, filling the cavity with adhesive. Finally, topical wounds can be closed by applying the adhesive on the wound while compressing the wound edges.  In any application, MARglue forms a strong yet flexible barrier that is non-toxic, biocompatible and has shown first biodegradation after 90 days.  Yet, the adhesive is easily removed in a surgical environment.  MARglue has a proven shelf life exceeding 9 months in a wide range of temperatures and environments.  This technology will allow for a soldier-compatible medical device that will lead to an increase in soldier survival and decrease amputation rates by providing wound closure between the battlefield and an MTF.  MARglue will also enable medics and soldiers to carry less gear while increasing treatment safety and effectiveness.

GrokStyle, Inc. Wins Phase II Grant with NSF IIP

InteliSpark client GrokStyle, Inc. has won a $747,959 contract with the National Science Foundation Division of Industrial Innovation Partnership for the Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project, “Innovative Visual Search and Similarity for Decor, Apparel, and Style”.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is to develop visual search for product recognition in the furniture and home décor vertical. Text-based searches have revolutionized the ability of people to complete tasks more quickly and efficiently as they are able to find the information they desire in an organized, compiled, and logical manner. Visual search provides the next level of disruption in search capabilities by allowing users to find information even more rapidly and accurately by using images. The deep learning-based software being developed will allow consumers to find products they are interested in, and co-purchase related products, quickly. Further, users will be more engaged through exposure to designer photographs of products (inspirational photography). By helping customers find exactly what they are looking for in a timely manner, user engagement and productivity will be increased. Further, related style-based recommendations will increase purchasing overall. Increased spending stimulates economic growth by increasing taxable revenue by retailers, and through increased sales taxes generated from the purchases. 

This project seeks to develop a visual search engine that is poised to disrupt retail and ecommerce by switching the focus from text-based to visual search-based exploration. The platform initially targets interior décor and furniture where deep learning techniques are trained to recognize products across a wide range of conditions

 A client-facing REST API will allow retailers, designers, and media companies to programmatically access functionality of the platform, and build their own user interfaces and apps on top of the deep learning technology. Lastly, it is proposed to develop a white-label app that can be customized for individual retailers who want to distribute this visual search capability to their customers. Achieving these objectives will create state-of-the-art performance in visual search for applications in interior design, apparel search, real estate search, and product look-up.