The University City Science Center has announced three awardees in the latest round of its QED Proof-of-Concept Program, which partners with regional academic and research institutions to prepare their most promising life science technologies for commercialization. 

The three researchers, representing the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the University of Delaware and the University of Pennsylvania, are developing a new therapy for acute leukemia using an agent that jump-starts the immune system; nanoparticles that deliver therapeutic cargo to stem cells; and an improved method for diagnosing and detecting cancer in liquid biopsies. 

The awardees will each receive $200,000 and critical support from the Science Center’s network of seasoned business advisors and industry experts to position their technologies for exit out of their host institutions and into a startup or licensing agreement. 

Awardees associated with Penn were: 

Haim H. Bau, professor of mechanical engineering and applied mechanics in Penn’s School of Engineering, for his invention for use in liquid biopsies, a method for enriching target nucleic acid in body fluid samples to enable personalized therapy, early disease screening and disease progression monitoring. For oncologists, the invention will allow high efficiency and specificity to detect cancer earlier in populations at risk, prescribe targeted drugs and alter drug regimen as drug-resistance evolves. 

Ian Henrich, who recently earned his PhD in pharmacology from the Perelman School of Medicine and now works for the department of pathology and laboratory medicine at CHOP, for a novel therapy utilizing USP6 to fire up the patient’s immune system against cancer cells. The team’s first target for proof of concept is acute myeloid leukemia. In the long-term, this therapy may be applied as a powerful immunotherapeutic for a wide range of malignancies and also serve in combination therapy to optimize response to CAR-T cells and checkpoint inhibitors.