Purdue Researchers Receive More Than $143K to Strengthen Marketplace Interest

Purdue University innovators who create new processes and products need capital, among other resources, to bring their ideas to reality. A Purdue fund is making financial support available to help them further develop their work.

Researchers from the College of Agriculture and College of Engineering have received more than $143,000 from the Trask Innovation Fund to make their work more attractive for commercial use. The fund is managed by the Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization. It awards up to $50,000 for short-term projects that enhance the commercial value of intellectual property. The application deadline for the next round of funding is Feb. 17.

Brooke Beier, Purdue Research Foundation’s senior vice president of commercialization, said researchers need funding to bridge the “valley of death” between creating innovations and advancing them to market.

“PRF recognizes that funding and other resources assist innovators and entrepreneurs in developing products viable for industry commercialization,” Beier said.

“The Trask Innovation Fund complements the other resources provided under the Purdue Innovates brand.”

Abhijit Karve, the Office of Technology Commercialization’s director of business development, said recipients have used Trask Innovation Fund awards in several ways.

“Often, companies want additional validation of the technology before they can license it. Trask Innovation Fund awards have been used to develop prototypes, conduct tests, support students and generate data,” Karve said.

“These steps add another round of validation for these researchers’ work and make it more attractive for the marketplace.”

Trask Innovation Fund recipients, their project and award amounts are:

• Jian Jin, College of Agriculture and College of Engineering, “PhenoBee: A Drone-Based Robot System for Single Leaf Scan with LeafSpec in the Soybean Field,” $25,000.
• Mohsen Mohammadi, College of Agriculture, “Efficient Genotype-Independent In-Planta Transformation of Wheat,” $47,773.
• Xiulin Ruan, College of Engineering, “Durable and Water-Based Radiative Cooling Paints,” $48,681.
• Gyeong Mee Yoon, College of Agriculture, “Constitutive Nuclear Targeting of CTR1 (CNTC) as a Genetic Tool to Confer a Drought Tolerant Trait to Soybeans,” $25,000.

Jin said researchers in his laboratory have been developing new sensing technology for next-generation plant phenotyping, which shows how genetics and the environment impact a plant’s characteristics and a crop’s yield performance.

“The newly awarded Trask funding will test PhenoBee, our new phenotyping drone robot, in the field and collect data to validate its accuracy and throughput for potential commercial applications,” Jin said.

“We hope through this project we will be able to prove PhenoBee provides unprecedented crop phenotyping quality for earlier nutrients and disease detection based on the featured LeafSpec technology.”

A video of a PhenoBee technology demonstration is available online at youtube.com/watch?v=VlIbcg2qS9o

Mohammadi said his team’s innovation enables fast-track genome editing and trait development to create wheat varieties that address challenges like salinity, drought, heat stress, diseases and pests.

“We will use this funding to evaluate the inheritance of traits to next generations and the applicability of the technique to develop better agronomic traits,” Mohammadi said.

Ruan said his research team has created ultrawhite radiative cooling paints that can cool below the ambient temperature under direct sunlight without consuming power.

“We will use the Trask award to further develop the paints and improve the readiness of the technology for market,” Ruan said.

“The paint formulations will be optimized to enable anti-soiling hydrophobic surfaces and minimize the amount of volatile organic compound (VOC), resulting in formulations that will be durable and water-based radiative cooling paints.”

Yoon said their CNTC technology enhances plant stress responses by modulating the hormone ethylene. She said the funding will be used to develop drought-tolerant soybean plants.

“The success of this project will not only provide new drought-tolerant soybean genotypes, but also improve our understanding of how plant hormones regulate stress responses in crops,” Yoon said. “It could potentially be applied to other important crops such as maize and rice.”

These and other inventions created by Purdue researchers across all academic disciplines and campuses are available for further development and licensing. Contact otcip@prf.org for more information.