University of Texas-Austin Wins Nano Competition
Just to round out our coverage of the Nano Nexus 2007 conference at TN’s Oak Ridge National Lab, here’s the update on the graduate student business competition — the Nano I2P Competition. The team of graduate students from the University of Texas have won the $25,000 first prize for their early-stage commercialization plan of their technology called NANOTaxi. (Photo: Abiola Ajetunmobi, co-inventor Cristal Glangchai, Jakub Felkl, ORNL Director Jeff Wadsworth, and Nicolas Rojeski.)
NANOTaxi is a nano-based drug delivery system that is designed to take a specific payload to any part of the body. NANOTaxi, which has its patent pending, initially will target cancer treatments, particularly lung cancer, which has the lowest survival rates among all cancer afflictions.
The nano aspect of this is almost alarmingly simple. The technology essentially acts like a taxi in bringing, say, a cancer treatment straight to diseased cells in the body. The nano device is injected into the body via the bloodstream, heads to the trouble spot, and then releases its payload.
The team says its next steps are to seek federal grant or angel funding to help fuel further product development. In the near term, they aim to round out its core team by adding an expert in the FDA approval process. Later they’ll hire a CEO who can take the company passed its in vivo clinical trial stages into full commercialization. NANOTaxi is a student-faculty collaboration project within the University of Texas.