Ingenious options to a few of the world’s most crucial issues are being found in labs, lecture rooms, and facilities throughout MIT each day. Many of those options transfer from the lab to the business world with the assistance of over 85 Institute assets that comprise MIT’s strong innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) ecosystem. The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Meals Techniques Lab (J-WAFS) attracts on MIT’s wealth of I&E information and expertise to assist researchers commercialize their breakthrough applied sciences by means of the J-WAFS Options grant program. By collaborating with I&E applications on campus, J-WAFS prepares MIT researchers for the business world, the place their novel improvements purpose to enhance productiveness, accessibility, and sustainability of water and meals techniques, creating financial, environmental, and societal advantages alongside the way in which.
The J-WAFS Options program launched in 2015 with help from Group Jameel, a world group that advances science and studying for communities to thrive. Since 2015, J-WAFS Options has supported 19 tasks with one-year grants of as much as $150,000, with some tasks receiving renewal grants for a second 12 months of help. Options tasks all tackle challenges associated to water or meals. Modeled after the esteemed grant program of MIT’s Deshpande Middle for Technological Innovation, and initially administered by Deshpande Middle employees, the J-WAFS Options program follows the same method by supporting tasks which have already accomplished the essential analysis and proof-of-concept phases. With applied sciences which might be one to 3 years away from commercialization, grantees work on figuring out their potential markets and be taught to concentrate on how their expertise can meet the wants of future clients.
“Ingenuity thrives at MIT, driving innovations that may be translated into real-world functions for widespread adoption, implantation, and use,” says J-WAFS Director Professor John H. Lienhard V. “However profitable commercialization of MIT expertise requires engineers to concentrate on many challenges past making the expertise work. MIT’s I&E community affords quite a lot of applications that assist researchers develop expertise readiness, examine markets, conduct buyer discovery, and provoke product design and improvement,” Lienhard provides. “With this robust I&E framework, many J-WAFS Options groups have established startup firms by the completion of the grant. J-WAFS-supported applied sciences have had highly effective, constructive results on human welfare. Collectively, the J-WAFS Options program and MIT’s I&E ecosystem show how tutorial analysis can evolve into enterprise improvements that make a greater world,” Lienhard says.
Creating I&E collaborations
Along with help for furthering analysis, J-WAFS Options grants permit college, college students, postdocs, and analysis employees to be taught the basics of remodel their work into business merchandise and corporations. As a part of the grant necessities, researchers should work together with mentors by means of MIT Enterprise Mentoring Service (VMS). VMS connects MIT entrepreneurs with groups of rigorously chosen professionals who present free and confidential mentorship, steerage, and different providers to assist advance concepts into for-profit, for-benefit, or nonprofit ventures. Since 2000, VMS has mentored over 4,600 MIT entrepreneurs throughout all industries, by means of a dynamic and completed group of practically 200 mentors who volunteer their time in order that others might succeed. The mentors present neutral and unbiased recommendation to members of the MIT neighborhood, together with MIT alumni within the Boston space. J-WAFS Options groups have been guided by 21 mentors from quite a few firms and nonprofits. Mentors typically attend mission occasions and progress conferences all through the grant interval.
“Working with VMS has supplied me and my group with a precious sounding board for a spread of matters, massive and small,” says Eric Verploegen PhD ’08, former analysis engineer in MIT’s D-Lab and founding father of J-WAFS spinout CoolVeg. Together with professors Leon Glicksman and Daniel Frey, Verploegen obtained a J-WAFS Options grant in 2021 to commercialize cold-storage chambers that use evaporative cooling to assist farmers protect vegetables and fruit in rural off-grid communities. Verploegen began CoolVeg in 2022 to extend entry and adoption of open-source, evaporative cooling applied sciences by means of collaborations with companies, analysis establishments, nongovernmental organizations, and authorities businesses. “Working as a solo founder at my nonprofit enterprise, it’s at all times nice to have avenues to get suggestions on communications approaches, general technique, and operational points that my mentors have expertise with,” Verploegen says. Three years after the preliminary Options grant, one of many VMS mentors assigned to the evaporative cooling group nonetheless acts as a mentor to Verploegen at present.
One other Options grant requirement is for groups to take part within the Spark program — a free, three-week course that gives an entry level for researchers to discover the potential worth of their innovation. Spark is a part of the Nationwide Science Basis’s (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps), which is an “immersive, entrepreneurial coaching program that facilitates the transformation of invention to impression.” In 2018, MIT obtained an award from the NSF, establishing the New England Regional Innovation Corps Node (NE I-Corps) to ship I-Corps coaching to individuals throughout New England. Trainings are open to researchers, engineers, scientists, and others who wish to have interaction in a buyer discovery course of for his or her expertise. Supplied recurrently all year long, the Spark course helps individuals establish markets and discover buyer wants with the intention to perceive how their applied sciences could be positioned competitively of their goal markets. They be taught to evaluate limitations to adoption, in addition to potential regulatory points or different challenges to commercialization. NE-I-Corps experiences that since its begin, over 1,200 researchers from MIT have accomplished this system and have gone on to launch 175 ventures, elevating over $3.3 billion in funding from grants and buyers, and creating over 1,800 jobs.
Constantinos Katsimpouras, a analysis scientist within the Division of Chemical Engineering, went by means of the NE I-Corps Spark program to raised perceive the client base for a expertise he developed with professors Gregory Stephanopoulos and Anthony Sinskey. The group obtained a J-WAFS Options grant in 2021 for his or her microbial platform that converts meals waste from the dairy business into precious merchandise. “As a scientist with no prior expertise in entrepreneurship, this system launched me to necessary ideas and instruments for conducting buyer interviews and adopting a brand new mindset,” notes Katsimpouras. “Most significantly, it inspired me to get out of the constructing and interact in interviews with potential clients and stakeholders, offering me with invaluable insights and a deeper understanding of my business,” he provides. These interviews additionally helped join the group with firms keen to offer assets to check and enhance their expertise — a essential step to the scale-up of any lab invention.
Within the case of Professor Cem Tasan’s analysis group within the Division of Supplies Science and Engineering, the I-Corps program led them to the J-WAFS Options grant, as an alternative of the opposite approach round. Tasan is at present working with postdoc Onur Guvenc on a J-WAFS Options mission to fabricate formable sheet metallic by consolidating metal scrap with out melting, thereby lowering water use in comparison with conventional metal processing. Earlier than making use of for the Options grant, Guvenc took half in NE I-Corps. Like Katsimpouras, Guvenc benefited from the interplay with business. “This program required me to step out of the lab and interact with potential clients, permitting me to study their fast challenges and take a look at my preliminary assumptions concerning the market,” Guvenc recollects. “My interviews with business professionals additionally made me conscious of the connection between water consumption and steelmaking processes, which in the end led to the J-WAFS 2023 Options Grant,” says Guvenc.
After finishing the Spark program, individuals could also be eligible to use for the Fusion program, which gives microgrants of as much as $1,500 to conduct additional buyer discovery. The Fusion program is self-paced, requiring groups to conduct 12 further buyer interviews and craft a last presentation summarizing their key learnings. Professor Patrick Doyle’s J-WAFS Options group accomplished the Spark and Fusion applications at MIT. Most just lately, their group was accepted to hitch the NSF I-Corps Nationwide program with a $50,000 award. The intensive program requires groups to finish an extra 100 buyer discovery interviews over seven weeks. Situated within the Division of Chemical Engineering, the Doyle lab is engaged on a sustainable microparticle hydrogel system to quickly take away micropollutants from water. The group’s focus has expanded to greater worth purifications in amino acid and biopharmaceutical manufacturing functions. Devashish Gokhale PhD ’24 labored with Doyle on a lot of the underlying science.
“Our platform expertise might probably be used for selective separations in very numerous market segments, starting from particular person customers to massive industries and authorities our bodies with various use-cases,” Gokhale explains. He goes on to say, “The I-Corps Spark program added important worth by offering me with an efficient framework to method this drawback … I used to be assigned a mentor who supplied essential suggestions, educating me formulate efficient questions and establish promising alternatives.” Gokhale says that by the top of Spark, the group was capable of establish the most effective goal markets for his or her merchandise. He additionally says that this system supplied precious seminars on matters like mental property, which was useful in subsequent discussions the group had with MIT’s Know-how Licensing Workplace.
One other member of Doyle’s group, Arjav Shah, a current PhD from MIT’s Division of Chemical Engineering and a present MBA candidate on the MIT Sloan Faculty of Administration, is spearheading the group’s commercialization plans. Shah attended Fusion final fall and hopes to steer efforts to include a startup firm known as hydroGel. “I love the hypothesis-driven method of the I-Corps program,” says Shah. “It has enabled us to establish our clients’ largest ache factors, which can hopefully lead us to discovering a product-market match.” He provides “based mostly on our learnings from this system, now we have been capable of pivot to impact-driven, higher-value functions within the meals processing and biopharmaceutical industries.” Postdoc Luca Mazzaferro will lead the technical group at hydroGel alongside Shah.
In a unique mission, Qinmin Zheng, a postdoc within the Division of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is working with Professor Andrew Whittle and Lecturer Fábio Duarte. Zheng plans to take the Fusion course this fall to advance their J-WAFS Options mission that goals to commercialize a novel sensor to quantify the relative abundance of main algal species and supply early detection of dangerous algal blooms. After finishing Spark, Zheng says he’s “excited to take part within the Fusion program, and probably the Nationwide I-Corps program, to additional discover market alternatives and decrease dangers in our future product improvement.”
Financial and societal advantages
Commercializing applied sciences developed at MIT is likely one of the methods J-WAFS helps be certain that MIT analysis advances could have real-world impacts in water and meals techniques. Since its inception, the J-WAFS Options program has awarded 28 grants (together with renewals), which have supported 19 tasks that tackle a variety of worldwide water and meals challenges. This system has distributed over $4 million to 24 professors, 11 analysis employees, 15 postdocs, and 30 college students throughout MIT. Almost half of all J-WAFS Options tasks have resulted in spinout firms or commercialized merchandise, together with eight firms so far plus two open-source applied sciences.
Nona Applied sciences is an instance of a J-WAFS spinout that’s serving to the world by growing new approaches to provide freshwater for consuming. Desalination — the method of eradicating salts from seawater — usually requires a large-scale expertise known as reverse osmosis. However Nona created a desalination system that may work in distant off-grid areas. By separating salt and micro organism from water utilizing electrical present by means of a course of known as ion focus polarization (ICP), their expertise additionally reduces general power consumption. The novel methodology was developed by Jongyoon Han, professor {of electrical} engineering and organic engineering, and analysis scientist Junghyo Yoon. Together with Bruce Crawford, a Sloan MBA alum, Han and Yoon created Nona Applied sciences to deliver their light-weight, energy-efficient desalination expertise to the market.
“My feeling early on was that upon getting expertise, commercialization will handle itself,” admits Crawford. The group accomplished each the Spark and Fusion applications and rapidly realized that rather more work can be required. “Even in our first 24 interviews, we realized that the 2 first markets we envisioned wouldn’t be viable within the close to time period, and we additionally acquired our first hints on the beachhead we in the end chosen,” says Crawford. Nona Applied sciences has since received MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competitors, obtained media consideration from shops like Newsweek and Fortune, and employed a group that continues to additional the expertise for deployment in resource-limited areas the place clear consuming water could also be scarce.
Meals-borne illnesses sicken hundreds of thousands of individuals worldwide every year, however J-WAFS researchers are addressing this situation by integrating molecular engineering, nanotechnology, and synthetic intelligence to revolutionize meals pathogen testing. Professors Tim Swager and Alexander Klibanov, of the Division of Chemistry, had been awarded one of many first J-WAFS Options grants for his or her sensor that targets meals security pathogens. The sensor makes use of specialised droplets that behave like a dynamic lens, altering within the presence of goal micro organism with the intention to detect harmful bacterial contamination in meals. In 2018, Swager launched Xibus Techniques Inc. to deliver the sensor to market and advance meals security for better public well being, sustainability, and financial safety.
“Our involvement with the J-WAFS Options Program has been very important,” says Swager. “It has supplied us with a bridge between the tutorial world and the enterprise world and allowed us to carry out extra detailed work to create a usable utility,” he provides. In 2022, Xibus developed a product known as XiSafe, which allows the detection of contaminants like salmonella and listeria quicker and with greater sensitivity than different meals testing merchandise. The innovation might save meals processors billions of {dollars} worldwide and forestall 1000’s of food-borne fatalities yearly.
J-WAFS Options firms have raised practically $66 million in enterprise capital and different funding. Simply this previous June, J-WAFS spinout SiTration introduced that it raised an $11.8 million seed spherical. Jeffrey Grossman, a professor in MIT’s Division of Supplies Science and Engineering, was one other early J-WAFS Options grantee for his work on low-cost energy-efficient filters for desalination. The mission enabled the event of nanoporous membranes and resulted in two spinout firms, By way of Separations and SiTration. SiTration was co-founded by Brendan Smith PhD ’18, who was part of the unique J-WAFS group. Smith is CEO of the corporate and has overseen the development of the membrane expertise, which has gone on to cut back value and useful resource consumption in industrial wastewater remedy, superior manufacturing, and useful resource extraction of supplies similar to lithium, cobalt, and nickel from recycled electrical car batteries. The corporate additionally just lately introduced that it’s working with the mining firm Rio Tinto to deal with dangerous wastewater generated at mines.
However it’s not simply J-WAFS spinout firms which might be producing real-world outcomes. Merchandise just like the ECC Vial — a transportable, low-cost methodology for E. coli detection in water — have been delivered to the market and helped 1000’s of individuals. The take a look at equipment was developed by MIT D-Lab Lecturer Susan Murcott and Professor Jeffrey Ravel of the MIT Historical past Part. The duo obtained a J-WAFS Options grant in 2018 to advertise safely managed consuming water and improved public well being in Nepal, the place it’s tough to establish which wells are contaminated by E. coli. By the top of their grant interval, the group had manufactured roughly 3,200 items, of which 2,350 had been distributed — sufficient to assist 12,000 individuals in Nepal. The researchers additionally skilled native Nepalese on finest manufacturing practices.
“It’s essential, in my life expertise, to observe your dream and to serve others,” says Murcott. Financial success is necessary to the well being of any enterprise, whether or not it’s an organization or a product, however equally necessary is the social impression — a philosophy that J-WAFS analysis strives to uphold. “Do one thing as a result of it’s value doing and since it modifications individuals’s lives and saves lives,” Murcott provides.
As J-WAFS prepares to rejoice its tenth anniversary this 12 months, we look ahead to continued collaboration with MIT’s many I&E applications to advance information and develop options that can have tangible results on the world’s water and meals techniques.
Be taught extra concerning the J-WAFS Options program and about innovation and entrepreneurship at MIT.
