Creative options to a number of the world’s most crucial issues are being found in labs, lecture rooms, and facilities throughout MIT day-after-day. Many of those options transfer from the lab to the business world with the assistance of over 85 Institute sources that comprise MIT’s sturdy innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) ecosystem. The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Meals Methods Lab (J-WAFS) attracts on MIT’s wealth of I&E data and expertise to assist researchers commercialize their breakthrough applied sciences via the J-WAFS Solutions grant program. By collaborating with I&E packages 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 methods, creating financial, environmental, and societal advantages alongside the way in which.
The J-WAFS Options program launched in 2015 with help from Community Jameel, a global 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 yr of help. Options tasks all tackle challenges associated to water or meals. Modeled after the esteemed grant program of MIT’s Deshpande Heart for Technological Innovation, and initially administered by Deshpande Heart workers, 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 can be one to 3 years away from commercialization, grantees work on figuring out their potential markets and be taught to deal with how their expertise can meet the wants of future prospects.
“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 deal with many challenges past making the expertise work. MIT’s I&E community gives a wide range of packages that assist researchers develop expertise readiness, examine markets, conduct buyer discovery, and provoke product design and growth,” Lienhard provides. “With this sturdy 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 exhibit how educational 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 workers to be taught the basics of easy methods to remodel their work into business merchandise and corporations. As a part of the grant necessities, researchers should work together with mentors via MIT Enterprise Mentoring Service (VMS). VMS connects MIT entrepreneurs with groups of rigorously chosen professionals who present free and confidential mentorship, steering, 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, via a dynamic and achieved group of almost 200 mentors who volunteer their time in order that others could 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 undertaking occasions and progress conferences all through the grant interval.
“Working with VMS has offered me and my group with a invaluable sounding board for a variety of subjects, 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 acquired a J-WAFS Options grant in 2021 to commercialize cold-storage chambers that use evaporative cooling to assist farmers protect vegatables and fruits in rural off-grid communities. Verploegen began CoolVeg in 2022 to extend entry and adoption of open-source, evaporative cooling applied sciences via 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, total 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 staff nonetheless acts as a mentor to Verploegen right now.
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 affect.” In 2018, MIT acquired an award from the NSF, establishing the New England Regional Innovation Corps Node (NE I-Corps) to ship I-Corps coaching to members throughout New England. Trainings are open to researchers, engineers, scientists, and others who need to have interaction in a buyer discovery course of for his or her expertise. Provided recurrently all year long, the Spark course helps members establish markets and discover buyer wants so as to perceive how their applied sciences will be positioned competitively of their goal markets. They be taught to evaluate obstacles to adoption, in addition to potential regulatory points or different challenges to commercialization. NE-I-Corps reviews 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 via 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 acquired a J-WAFS Options grant in 2021 for his or her microbial platform that converts meals waste from the dairy trade into invaluable merchandise. “As a scientist with no prior expertise in entrepreneurship, this system launched me to vital 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 have interaction in interviews with potential prospects and stakeholders, offering me with invaluable insights and a deeper understanding of my trade,” he provides. These interviews additionally helped join the staff with firms prepared to offer sources to check and enhance their expertise — a vital 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 manner round. Tasan is at present working with postdoc Onur Guvenc on a J-WAFS Options undertaking to fabricate formable sheet steel 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 trade. “This program required me to step out of the lab and have interaction with potential prospects, permitting me to study their instant challenges and check my preliminary assumptions in regards to the market,” Guvenc remembers. “My interviews with trade professionals additionally made me conscious of the connection between water consumption and steelmaking processes, which finally led to the J-WAFS 2023 Options Grant,” says Guvenc.
After finishing the Spark program, members 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 extra buyer interviews and craft a ultimate presentation summarizing their key learnings. Professor Patrick Doyle’s J-WAFS Options staff accomplished the Spark and Fusion packages at MIT. Most lately, their staff 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 staff’s focus has expanded to increased 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 various market segments, starting from particular person shoppers to massive industries and authorities our bodies with diverse 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 offered vital suggestions, instructing me easy methods to formulate efficient questions and establish promising alternatives.” Gokhale says that by the top of Spark, the staff was capable of establish one of the best goal markets for his or her merchandise. He additionally says that this system offered invaluable seminars on subjects like mental property, which was useful in subsequent discussions the staff had with MIT’s Know-how Licensing Workplace.
One other member of Doyle’s staff, Arjav Shah, a latest PhD from MIT’s Division of Chemical Engineering and a present MBA candidate on the MIT Sloan Faculty of Administration, is spearheading the staff’s commercialization plans. Shah attended Fusion final fall and hopes to steer efforts to include a startup firm referred to as hydroGel. “I like the hypothesis-driven method of the I-Corps program,” says Shah. “It has enabled us to establish our prospects’ largest ache factors, which is able to hopefully lead us to discovering a product-market match.” He provides “based mostly on our learnings from this system, we’ve got been capable of pivot to impact-driven, higher-value functions within the meals processing and biopharmaceutical industries.” Postdoc Luca Mazzaferro will lead the technical staff at hydroGel alongside Shah.
In a unique undertaking, 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 undertaking 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 reduce dangers in our future product growth.”
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 can have real-world impacts in water and meals methods. 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 workers, 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 thus far plus two open-source applied sciences.
Nona Technologies is an instance of a J-WAFS spinout that’s serving to the world by creating new approaches to provide freshwater for consuming. Desalination — the method of eradicating salts from seawater — sometimes requires a large-scale expertise referred to as reverse osmosis. However Nona created a desalination gadget that may work in distant off-grid areas. By separating salt and micro organism from water utilizing electrical present via a course of referred to as ion focus polarization (ICP), their expertise additionally reduces total vitality consumption. The novel technique 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 convey 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 staff accomplished each the Spark and Fusion packages and rapidly realized that rather more work can be required. “Even in our first 24 interviews, we discovered that the 2 first markets we envisioned wouldn’t be viable within the close to time period, and we additionally received our first hints on the beachhead we finally chosen,” says Crawford. Nona Applied sciences has since received MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competitors, acquired media consideration from retailers like Newsweek and Fortune, and employed a staff 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 tens of millions 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 so as to detect harmful bacterial contamination in meals. In 2018, Swager launched Xibus Systems Inc. to convey 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 important,” says Swager. “It has offered 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 software,” he provides. In 2022, Xibus developed a product referred to as XiSafe, which permits the detection of contaminants like salmonella and listeria quicker and with increased sensitivity than different meals testing merchandise. The innovation might save meals processors billions of {dollars} worldwide and forestall hundreds of food-borne fatalities yearly.
J-WAFS Options firms have raised almost $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 undertaking enabled the event of nanoporous membranes and resulted in two spinout firms, Via Separations and SiTration. SiTration was co-founded by Brendan Smith PhD ’18, who was part of the unique J-WAFS staff. 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 therapy, superior manufacturing, and useful resource extraction of supplies reminiscent of lithium, cobalt, and nickel from recycled electrical car batteries. The corporate additionally lately introduced that it’s working with the mining firm Rio Tinto to deal with dangerous wastewater generated at mines.
But it surely’s not simply J-WAFS spinout firms which can be producing real-world outcomes. Merchandise just like the ECC Vial — a conveyable, low-cost technique for E. coli detection in water — have been dropped at the market and helped hundreds of individuals. The check package was developed by MIT D-Lab Lecturer Susan Murcott and Professor Jeffrey Ravel of the MIT Historical past Part. The duo acquired a J-WAFS Options grant in 2018 to advertise safely managed consuming water and improved public well being in Nepal, the place it’s troublesome to establish which wells are contaminated by E. coli. By the top of their grant interval, the staff had manufactured roughly 3,200 items, of which 2,350 had been distributed — sufficient to assist 12,000 folks in Nepal. The researchers additionally educated native Nepalese on finest manufacturing practices.
“It’s crucial, in my life expertise, to comply with your dream and to serve others,” says Murcott. Financial success is vital to the well being of any enterprise, whether or not it’s an organization or a product, however equally vital is the social affect — a philosophy that J-WAFS analysis strives to uphold. “Do one thing as a result of it’s price doing and since it modifications folks’s lives and saves lives,” Murcott provides.
As J-WAFS prepares to have a good time its tenth anniversary this yr, we sit up for continued collaboration with MIT’s many I&E packages to advance data and develop options that may have tangible results on the world’s water and meals methods.
Study extra in regards to the J-WAFS Solutions program and about innovation and entrepreneurship at MIT.
