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Venture Partners at CU Boulder has announced the first recipients of a new translational funding program designed to advance promising, early-stage therapeutics with strong commercial potential. The program provides up to $50,000 per project to help CU Boulder researchers generate critical validation data or develop new intellectual property, bringing new treatments a step closer to patients in need.

“CU Boulder is a world-class destination for bioscience research,” said Hannah Nelson, associate director of licensing at Venture Partners, “and our innovative faculty have created a robust pipeline of novel drugs and therapeutic targets.”

Many promising therapeutic projects reach a stage where they no longer qualify for basic research funding but are still too early for translational grants or private investment. This funding gap can stall progress.
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But what is "commercialization?"

The path to commercialization—also known as "research translation" or "tech transfer"—can be challenging, so Venture Partners unites��industry partners, entrepreneurs and investors to help��researchers, inventors and creators at the University of Colorado bring their groundbreaking discoveries into the marketplace.

Explore the Path to Commercialization

This funding program is designed to bridge that gap by supporting commercially promising drug development efforts. The awarded projects ultimately aim to develop FDA-approved drugs and have a clear path to commercialization, having validated their development approach through customer discovery interviews.

“This funding supports a critical stage in drug development,” said Justin Stitzlein, venture analyst at Venture Partners. “Our goal is to give these teams the support they need to generate compelling data and position themselves for the next stage of development. We believe this kind of early support can unlock significant long-term impact.”

Awardees

Orally Available Obesity Therapeutic

Led by Distinguished Professor Leslie Leinwand (BioFrontiers Institute,��CU Boulder Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology), with PhD student����and postdoctoral researchers����and��, the team is developing an orally available obesity drug that suppresses appetite without affecting gastric emptying or causing muscle loss. Their compound offers a differentiated mechanism from current GLP-1 agonists such as Wegovy/Ozempic, aiming to improve tolerability and adherence.

Efflux Pump Inhibitor Discovery Platform

Professor��Corrie Detweiler (CU Boulder Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology) and her team are developing novel small-molecule inhibitors that restore the effectiveness of antibiotics against multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria. Using a host-informed, high-throughput assay platform that better reflects infection conditions, they aim to identify efflux pump inhibitors to treat patients with infections that do not respond to traditional antibiotics alone.

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