Three Ohio State University spinoff companies and two research projects were awarded a combined $400,000 from the Ohio Third Frontier Commission out of a total $12.5 million awarded Thursday.
Another grant to Ohio University addresses a common worry in the coming development of the state’s shale gas reserves.
The money came from the bond-funded Third Frontier’s Technology and Validation Start-Up Fund, which is meant to help with prototypes or other testing of technology from startups and universities as a step toward commercialization.
The OSU-related awards are:
• $100,000 for Core Quantum Technologies Inc., which was developed out of research from the lab http://nanoforneuro.com/ of professor Jessica Winter to develop probes for medical tests so tiny that they can be used to manipulate a single nerve cell. The companywon the annual business plan competition in May at the Fisher College of Business, and its CEO Kunal Parikh graduated in June with a chemical engineering degree.
• $100,000 for Dublin-based ALPPS Ltd., which stands for Advanced Language Performance Portfolio System, software that will help educators and others assess a person’s skill speaking a second language. It is a project of the project of the National East Asian Languages Resource Center in the College of Arts and Sciences.
• $100,000 for CGC Ultramarin Ltd., to develop a prototype marine jet propulsion system. It’s headed by Codrin Gruie Cantemir, a research scientist at the Center for Automotive Research.
• $50,000 apiece for research projects to develop an electromagnetic probe that can detect during surgery if all of a solid cancerous tumor has been removed, and to develop an iPad application to allow users to self-test their cognitive skills for use in early detection of dementia.
In Athens, Ohio University was awarded $50,000 for a project to use catalytic materials – a substance that speeds chemical reactions without itself reacting – to help treat wastewater produced byshale gas wells.
The largest awards in Thursday’s distribution went to through the Third Frontier’s Entrepreneurial Signature Program that helps startups: $5.5 million to Cincinnati and $4 million to Dayton. In addition, Youngstown State University received $2.1 million for a manufacturing research center that has also attracted $30 million in U.S. Air Force support.
Source: Columbus Business First: http://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/news/2012/08/24/ohio-state-ventures-land-400k-from.html?page=2
