Every day at Virginia Commonwealth University, faculty researchers are making new discoveries and developing technologies that hold the promise of improving lives and transforming society.

But to take ideas from a laboratory and commercialize them with the hopes of someday seeing their technologies used for good — and hopefully, creating revenue — requires partners beyond the walls of the university and academic medical center.

One of those partners is the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corp., or VIPC. A nonprofit state agency, VIPC is the commercialization and seed stage economic development driver in the Commonwealth. Its team leads funding, infrastructure, and policy initiatives to support Virginia's innovators and startups. To support its mission, VIPC collaborates with local, regional, state, and federal partners — among them, VCU TechTransfer and Ventures.

As part of its work, VIPC manages the Commonwealth Commercialization Fund, which provides funding to technologies with a high potential for economic development and job creation. The fund has distributed more than $55 million to Virginia-based startups, entrepreneurs, and university-based inventors since 2012 in support of critical early technology testing and market validation efforts.

Here’s a roundup of those VCU researchers who have received funding from the VIPC over the past 12 months.

Michael McClure Ph.D., was awarded $75,000. He leads research at the McClure Lab, developing a collagen-based muscle scaffolding to address rotator cuff injuries. Current treatments lack natural bioactive factors crucial for muscle regeneration, leading to prolonged recovery and re-tearing issues. The lab's approach, utilizing decellularized human cadaver muscle, shows promise in promoting muscle growth, blood vessel formation, and nerve support while minimizing scarring. 

Pictured: Michael McClure, Ph.D.

McClure, an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the VCU College of Engineering, founded Sarcogenics LLC to commercialize the technology. With an aging population driving demand, the market for such bio-scaffolds is expected to grow. The project, ongoing for a decade with demonstrated efficacy in rodent models, aims for U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval by conducting further testing against existing standards. The team is also exploring additional muscle-loss injuries.

Thomas Roper, Ph.D., and graduate student Matthew Glace received a $75,000 award to support their chemical analysis modeling solution. Their IP “takes a time-consuming, manual process and turns it into one that is superior in accuracy and length of time,” says Roper, director of pharmaceutical engineering in the Department of Chemical and Life Science Engineering at the VCU College of Engineering. “A process that once took days is now accomplished in minutes.”

Pictured: Thomas Roper, Ph.D. (left), Matthew Glace

A variety of commercial manufacturing applications, including those in the pharmaceutical, oil, and food industries, rely on spectroscopic data to rapidly assess product quality. Spectroscopy, or the study of objects and materials based on their color, can be used in quality-control settings to understand a product’s temperature, composition and purity. 

Converting spectroscopic data to models that can be used to monitor and control pharmaceutical processes, in particular, requires extensive time and personnel effort. To reduce this burden, Glace — under the guidance of Roper — discovered and is developing a platform to extract chemical measurements from raw spectroscopic data. The new funding will enable the researchers to further refine, validate and market the platform, which in early testing shows to be capable of meeting or outperforming humans. 

Companies have already expressed interest in the platform, and the grant is enabling necessary improvements to the algorithm and its ability to analyze more complex, diverse datasets, making the technology more attractive to future licensing and commercialization opportunities.

Massimo Bertino, Ph.D. was awarded $75,000 for his research in collaboration with ThermaGEL Innovations. They are developing a commercially viable aerogel core for vacuum insulation panels (VIPs), which can be used in building insulation. Vacuum insulation panels (VIPs) are excellent thermal insulators, yet aren’t practical due to cost and difficulty being shaped to size.

Bertino and ThermaGEL say the panels offer superior thermal insulation, mechanical strength, and fireproofing at a lower cost compared to traditional methods, making them suitable for various industries. With over 130 million poorly insulated buildings in the U.S., they hope their aerogels will reduce energy waste and carbon emissions. ThermaGEL Innovations was founded to commercialize Bertino's research, aiming to redefine sustainable insulation solutions globally. 

The VIPC funding will allow the ThermaGEL team to build on a grant the company received from the U.S. Department of Energy. ThermaGEL will perform additional customer discovery, validation and de-risking of its products by demonstrating how to scale manufacturing and handle requirements that construction companies have for on-site installation.

Swadesh Das, Ph.D. received a $100,000 grant as part of his research at the VCU Institute of Molecular Medicine. Das’s work is addressing glioblastoma (GBM), a deadly brain cancer with limited treatment options. 

His team developed a patent-pending therapeutic adenovirus that shows promise in significantly reducing GBM growth and progression in preclinical models. The drug can be injected directly into tumors or administered without compromising safety. It efficiently destroys tumor cells while sparing healthy tissue and potentially boosting immunity against cancer recurrence. 

“There are no standards of care that significantly extend survival for patients diagnosed with glioblastoma. Our revolutionary molecular medicine and delivery strategy could provide a paradigm shift in the treatment of GBM, along with secondary metastatic brain cancer, especially for patients who are not eligible for surgery or more conventional therapies,” says Das, an associate professor in the Department of Human and Molecular Genetics at the VCU School of Medicine. “The work that we’ve done thus far to advance this technology has been promising, and this grant from [VIPC] will allow us to further advance the science in preparation for clinical trials and FDA approval.”

VIPC’s funding will support collecting preclinical data across genetically diverse GBM and metastasis patients, assessing safety in humanized mice, and preparing for clinical trials and FDA approval. 

Virginia startup InterLeukin Combinatorial Therapies Inc. has licensed Das’s intellectual property with plans to commercialize it in a deal made by VCU TechTransfer and Ventures. The company was co-founded by the VCU School of Medicine’s professor of human and molecular genetics and Thelma Newmeyer Corman Chair of Cancer Research in the VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center Paul B. Fisher, Ph.D. and Webster K. Cavenee, Ph.D. of the University of California San Diego.