The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation has selected nine projects to receive development funding through the UW/WARF COVID-19 Accelerator Challenge, the organization announced recently.
“The response was overwhelming,” WARF CEO Erik Iverson said in a statement. “We are grateful, humbled and excited to see how these innovations advance over the coming months to help our world respond and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The selected projects are led by the following Principal Investigators:
- Azam Ahmed (neurological surgery) and Terrence Oakes (radiology) for safe and sanitizable technologies to help prevent virus spread in a hospital setting.
- Kayley Janssen (Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene) for surveillance of the virus in wastewaters.
- Tim Osswald (mechanical engineering) for mass production of cleanable and reusable respirators.
- Kalpana Raja and Ron Stewart (Morgridge Institute for Research) for a drug repurposing discovery system.
- Joshua Medow (biomedical engineering) for a digital assistance system for medical staff.
- Lennon Rodgers (UW Makerspace) for a compact air-purifying respirator.
- David O’Connor (pathology and laboratory medicine), Thomas Friedrich (pathobiological sciences) and David Beebe (biomedical engineering) for accelerated COVID-19 testing.
- Nathan Sherer (oncology) for an assay to identify virus inhibitors.
- Brian Yandell (statistics) for a method to track and visualize the outbreak in counties with small populations.
As previously reported, the $100,000 fund is designed to speed the development of prototypes and other highly deployable concepts that can be commercialized or implemented in 6-12 months.
