Fund Injects Cash into Lucrative Research

For scientists with difficulties getting potentially-lucrative research into the marketplace, a new Harvard program will continue providing a much needed boost.

After funding six Harvard discoveries last year, school officials announced earlier this month that they will be launching a second round of the Accelerator Fund, a pool of private funding earmarked for University life-sciences researchers struggling to enter the commercial arena.

“Most of our technologies in life sciences are very embryonic in nature. They’re very early stage technologies,” said Issac T. Kohlberg, director of Harvard’s Office of Technology (OTD) Director, which oversees the fund. “In order to find a partner—be it a company or a group of investors—who are interested in undertaking further development, we need to reach a further stage which we call the ‘Kitty Hawk’ point.”

According to Kohlberg, marketable technologies often languish in the lab for lack of research funds.

“We don’t want these technologies to end up in Death Valley,” Kohlberg said.

The Accelerator Fund was launched last year with $6 million in donations that came primarily from alumni “who have an affinity toward this area.”

The first found of funding—awarded last fall—was geared toward marketable research to combat widespread diseases, such as HIV, cancer, and diabetes.

“My personal feeling is that academic researchers can really have significant impact on health care and society by lending their expertise to projects that can be translated into therapeutic intervention,” said Joan S. Brugge, a professor of cell biology who sits on the Accelerator Advisory Committee.

The fund has already helped one breakthrough—which emerged from the work of Harvard scientists Jose Halperin and Gerhard Wagner—enter a licensing agreement with Egenix, Inc, a New York-based biotechnology company.

Kohlberg said that such agreements will help make the fund self-perpetuating because 20 percent of proceeds from licensing deals inked with help from the accelerator to replenish the pool of funds.

According to Brugge, the areas funded had the potential of having the greatest impact on others.

“The highest priority is given to projects that involve the study of disease that’s more common,” Brugge said.

Grants from this round, which is slated to provide the same level of funding to researchers, will be awarded by a committee including professors and officials from private health-care companies.

The committee will consider proposals in two rounds—a pre-proposal submission due by March 10 and a follow-up final consideration due May 16. The final decisions will be announced on June 23.

The program advertises likely funding levels of $100,000 to $150,000 for a one-year period.

In the first iteration of the accelerator, the committee reviewed 27 pre-proprosals and 13 final submissions.

Kohlberg added that the University hopes to build on the accelerator model with a similar fund for engineering and applied sciences.

That fund “is very likely that it will come to fruition in the next two or three years,” he said.

—Staff writer Clifford M. Marks can be reached at cmarks@fas.harvard.edu

—Staff writer Kevin Zhou can be reached at kzhou@fas.harvard.edu.