Award & Investment Overview
The Tulane Innovation Institute, in partnership with Provost Robin Forman, has awarded three Provost’s Proof of Concept (PPOC) Fund grants totaling $150,000 to university research teams developing technologies focused on the brain, nervous system, and neurological regulation of disease.
Each project received $50,000 during the fund’s eighth funding cycle, with recipients recognized on October 20, 2026, at Tulane’s eighth Open Medical Innovation Challenge (MIC) Night.
The three funded projects are:
- Tenghuan “Talia” Ge and colleagues: An artificial intelligence and laboratory platform designed to improve drug discovery and evaluation for diseases involving the brain and blood-brain barrier.
- Dr. Sina Pourtaheri and colleagues: A needle-free nasal spray designed to deliver nerve growth factor to the central nervous system following spinal cord injury.
- T. Cooper Woods and colleagues: An experimental oral treatment for Type 2 diabetes targeting a neural pathway involved in blood glucose regulation.
The awards are administered through the Tulane Innovation Institute’s Robert L. Priddy Innovation Lab.
The PPOC Fund supports research activities that fall between traditional academic funding and commercial investment, including product development, customer discovery, regulatory planning, intellectual property evaluation, and early-stage technology validation.
The reported follow-on funding and spinout activity are important indicators of the program’s commercialization role. They show that Tulane is using relatively small, targeted investments to help research teams generate evidence and pursue subsequent development opportunities.
Approach & Ecosystem Context
Tulane’s Provost’s Proof of Concept Fund is a direct example of an institutional GAP funding mechanism designed to address the period between academic discovery and commercial readiness.
University research grants generally support scientific investigation and publication. Commercial investors and industry partners, however, often require additional evidence before committing resources to a technology.
That evidence may include technical reproducibility, a defined product concept, an intellectual property position, regulatory considerations, customer needs, and a credible development pathway.
The PPOC Fund helps researchers undertake this work before technologies are ready for licensing, company formation, or external investment.
A structured institutional commercialization pathway
The fund is administered by the Robert L. Priddy Innovation Lab within the Tulane Innovation Institute, providing a connection between research development and university commercialization support.
The eighth funding cycle attracted applications from six Tulane schools, demonstrating the program’s cross-disciplinary reach.
The funded teams will use their awards for different commercialization objectives:
- The AI-enabled drug discovery team will refine its platform, expand compound testing, and standardize workflows that could support a repeatable research service.
- The spinal cord injury team will advance formulation development, tissue safety evaluation, delivery testing, and regulatory and commercial planning.
- The diabetes team will compare drug candidates and doses, assess mechanisms of action, investigate potential biomarkers, and conduct customer discovery.
These activities address distinct technical and commercial uncertainties, but they share a common purpose: making research outcomes more suitable for evaluation by potential licensees, development partners, and investors.
Mind the GAP perspective
Tulane’s program reflects a central principle of the Mind the GAP Initiative: institutional proof-of-concept funding can provide targeted resources for development activities that fall outside the scope of conventional research support.
The program’s reported results provide useful evidence of its role in the commercialization ecosystem.
Since March 2023, the PPOC Fund has supported 26 teams with more than $1.3 million in grants. Seven spinout companies have been formed by participating teams, and more than 55 students have gained research project experience.
Tulane also reports that 12 completed projects have subsequently attracted more than $9 million in additional funding.
These figures do not establish that the PPOC awards alone caused the follow-on investment or company formation. They do, however, demonstrate the subsequent commercialization activity associated with projects receiving early institutional support.
The program is particularly relevant because it combines milestone-oriented project funding with an institutional innovation environment that includes the Open Medical Innovation Challenge.
Together, these mechanisms provide researchers with financial resources, exposure to commercialization stakeholders, and opportunities to develop their technologies beyond the laboratory.
Innovation & Technology
1. AI-Enabled Blood-Brain Barrier Drug Discovery Platform
Project Lead: Tenghuan “Talia” Ge | Award: $50,000
Tenghuan Ge, senior project manager at Tulane School of Medicine, is leading the development of an artificial intelligence and laboratory platform designed to improve the evaluation of drug candidates for brain disorders.
The project addresses a persistent challenge in pharmaceutical development: designing therapeutics capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier while maintaining appropriate safety and effectiveness.
The blood-brain barrier protects the central nervous system but can also prevent potentially useful therapeutic compounds from reaching their intended targets.
This limitation contributes to the difficulty, expense, and uncertainty associated with developing medicines for neurological conditions.
The Tulane team aims to create a standardized platform that academic researchers and industry partners could use to design and evaluate drug candidates more efficiently.
Initial applications will focus on inflammation associated with Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, traumatic brain injury, and rare immune disorders.
The PPOC award will support refinement of blood-brain barrier modeling tools, expanded compound testing against key enzymes, and standardized experimental workflows.
The research team includes Zhen Zhao, Xiangming Zha, and Matthew E. Burow.
From a commercialization perspective, the project is notable because its proposed product is not necessarily a single therapeutic candidate. It is a potential drug discovery and evaluation service that could support multiple research programs.
The next development milestone is demonstrating that its methods can provide sufficiently reproducible and useful results for prospective academic or pharmaceutical customers.
2. Intranasal Nerve Growth Factor Therapy for Spinal Cord Injury
Project Lead: Dr. Sina Pourtaheri | Award: $50,000
Dr. Sina Pourtaheri, a spine surgeon and adjunct associate professor at Tulane’s School of Science and Engineering, is leading the development of a needle-free nasal spray intended to deliver nerve growth factor to the central nervous system following spinal cord injury.
The project targets the early period after injury, when secondary damage can continue to destroy surviving nerve tissue.
The proposed treatment is designed to protect nerve cells and support recovery before scar tissue formation limits the potential for repair.
Intranasal administration could provide an alternative delivery pathway for a therapeutic molecule intended to act within the central nervous system.
The $50,000 PPOC award will support several development priorities:
- Finalization of the nasal spray formulation.
- Evaluation of delivery speed and effectiveness in reaching the spinal cord.
- Assessment of safety in human nasal tissue.
- Regulatory and commercialization pathway planning.
The project team includes Professor Kyriakos D. Papadopoulos, postdoctoral researcher Setareh Adibzadeh, and doctoral candidate Abdul Aziz Abdullah.
This is Pourtaheri’s second PPOC award. His earlier project involved a patented approach for delivering drugs and biologically active molecules directly to injury or surgical sites.
The current project remains at an early development stage. Its commercialization prospects depend on demonstrating adequate delivery, acceptable safety, and therapeutic benefit.
The grant is therefore focused on technical and translational milestones that could support further development investment.
3. Neural Pathway-Targeted Oral Therapy for Type 2 Diabetes
Project Lead: T. Cooper Woods | Award: $50,000
A multidisciplinary Tulane team is developing an experimental oral therapy for Type 2 diabetes that targets a neural pathway involved in blood glucose regulation.
The project brings together T. Cooper Woods, associate professor of physiology and medicine, with Tulane Brain Institute researchers Andrei Derbenev and Andrea Zsombok.
The research explores whether targeting neural mechanisms involved in glucose regulation could provide a different therapeutic approach to managing Type 2 diabetes.
Existing treatments can improve blood glucose control, but some patients require multiple medications and remain at risk of long-term complications.
According to the announcement, early preclinical studies found that a single dose of the experimental treatment improved blood glucose control.
These results provide an initial rationale for further investigation but do not establish clinical effectiveness.
The PPOC award will support:
- Comparison of therapeutic designs and doses.
- Evaluation against existing diabetes treatments.
- Further investigation of the treatment’s mechanism of action.
- Exploration of a blood-based biomarker that could identify likely responders.
- Research staffing, supplies, and customer discovery.
The biomarker work is particularly relevant to commercialization because identifying responsive patient populations could inform future clinical trial design and therapeutic positioning.
The project remains preclinical. The next development stage will focus on establishing a stronger evidence base for the candidate’s mechanism, performance, and potential clinical applications.
Related Topics
Tulane University, Tulane Innovation Institute, Provost’s Proof of Concept Fund, PPOC, Robert L. Priddy Innovation Lab, Robin Forman, Kimberly Gramm, Open Medical Innovation Challenge, university commercialization, proof-of-concept funding, GAP funding, translational research, university spinouts, technology transfer, venture development, blood-brain barrier, artificial intelligence drug discovery, neuroinflammation, spinal cord injury, intranasal drug delivery, nerve growth factor, Type 2 diabetes, neural pathways, preclinical therapeutics, biomedical innovation, commercialization readiness
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innovosource tracks GAP programs, including proof-of-concept programs, startup accelerators, translational research initiatives, university venture funds, and commercialization ecosystems that help move university innovations from research to market.
Our coverage is informed by the Mind the GAP Initiative and the GAP COA consortium activity, providing practical insights into the evolving commercialization landscape.
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