Purdue ECE project receives award from Office of Technology Commercialization's Trask Innovation Fund
The Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization has awarded funding from the Trask Innovation Fund to a project led by Saeed Mohammadi, professor in Purdue’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Mohammadi is co-PI on "Detecting Transitional Cell Carcinoma and Leptospirosis in Urine," along with Deborah Knapp, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Oncology and Dolores L. McCall Professor of Comparative Oncology in Purdue’s College of Veterinary Medicine. The innovation has been licensed from the Office of Technology Commercialization to Molecular Diagnostics, a startup company.
The project focuses on creating a fast, noninvasive and low-cost cancer screening technique. The initial focus is detecting bladder cancer in dogs, but the eventual goal is detecting bladder cancer and other disease in people.
Mohammadi said the Trask award will make it possible to build a prototype to detect bladder cancer in urine samples of dogs. Project leaders will distribute prototype devices to researchers at Purdue and elsewhere who work on transitional cell carcinoma, or TCC, in dogs.
"Deborah is a world-renowned researcher on TCC. She will help with testing TCC and control samples," Mohammadi said. "We hope to improve the sensitivity and specificity of our technique so it can be used to detect the disease at early stages and improve the prognosis of the disease. If this can be established, there will be a good potential for the application of such a simple and noninvasive technique for screening cancer in humans."
The Trask Innovation Fund supports short-term projects that enhance the commercial value of Purdue's intellectual property. The application deadline for the next round of funding is Feb. 18.