The Biolocity team recently teamed up with fellow Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) DRIVe Network Accelerators New Orleans BioInnovation Center and First Flight Venture Center to host the Southeast COVID-19 Innovation Showcase.
Learn more about the event and related funding opportunities here.
Congratulations to Shawna Khouri, Biolocity Managing Director, for being selected from a pool of over 400 applicants for a new program designed to recognize the achievements of Georgia Institute of Technology alumni who are improving the human condition.
ATLANTA, JULY 15, 2020 — The Georgia Tech Alumni Association has announced 40 distinguished honorees who have innovated industries and positively impacted communities across the globe. In its first year, more than 250 individuals were nominated by colleagues, peers, and Georgia Tech faculty this April.
Shawna Khouri is a life science entrepreneur and funder who has catalyzed and grown Atlanta’s life science start-up ecosystem. Khouri shares that “Being a Georgia Tech alumna is something to be proud of, but being included amongst such an impressive list of peers is simply humbling.”
In its inaugural year, the 2020 class includes Olympian and breast cancer survivor Chaunté Lowe; founder of the Algorithmic Justice League (and one of Shawna Khouri’s freshman dorm-mates), Joy Buolamwini, whose research on algorithmic bias in artificial intelligence (AI) has led to policy and industry changes in addressing AI harms; and Maithili Appalwar, who founded Avana to address the alarming rate of suicides among farmers in Yavatmal, a district in Maharashtra, India by working with more than 10,000 farmers to conserve more than 50 billion liters of water.
“I am amazed and humbled by the accomplishments of these innovators and trendsetters. They epitomize the focus that our Georgia Tech alumni have to make the world a better place,” shares Dene Sheheane, president of the Georgia Tech Alumni Association.
Those nominated must have completed at least one semester at Georgia Tech, be under the age of 40 as of June 30, 2020, and have made an impact in their profession or community, spanning all industries and sectors. A committee of 26 faculty, staff, and volunteer leaders, who collectively represented all Georgia Tech colleges, scored each nominee using a 25-point rubric. Selection Committee member Bert Reeves, MGT 2000, State Representative in the Georgia House of Representatives, expressed that, “I was blown away at the nearly impossible task of scoring the applicants. These are folks who are not just impacting their community and state, but in some cases, their country and the entire world. It is truly inspiring to see the innovation and passion that our alumni are contributing to many of the greatest issues our world faces today.”
A list of all 40 honorees is available here.
About the Georgia Tech Alumni Association
The Georgia Tech Alumni Association, chartered in 1908, is an exclusive network of more than 172,000 worldwide tied together by their experience at Georgia Tech. Through the Association, Tech alumni gain immediate access to its extensive, global alumni network, as well as numerous alumni programs and services designed to enrich both careers and lives. The Georgia Tech Alumni Association is a participation-driven non-profit corporation governed by a board of alumni volunteers. Since 1947, the Association’s Roll Call program has raised money to financially support Tech’s academic mission, a tradition that has transformed the Institute into the place it is today. Learn more at www.gtalumni.org.
Biolocity is an incubator at Emory University & Georgia Institute of Technology focused on advancing life science technologies to the market. In October 2019, Biolocity was selected to join the BARDA DRIVe Accelerator Network. In this role, we have been working with BARDA to identify companies and innovative technologies that help address 21st-century health security threats, with a recent focus on COVID-19. In response to the Coronavirus public health emergency, we received numerous questions from members of our ecosystem and we saw an opportunity to share BARDA DRIVe’s perspective as well as their funding and partnership opportunities.
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The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority or BARDA, as we are known, is part of the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR). BARDA invests in the innovation, advanced research and development, acquisition, and manufacturing of medical countermeasures – vaccines, drugs, therapeutics, diagnostic tools, and devices needed to combat health security threats, including pandemics like COVID-19, and save lives. Our development goal is always regulatory approval, licensure, or clearance.
Within BARDA, DRIVe, the Division of Research, Innovation and Ventures, accelerates the development and availability of transformative technologies and approaches, particularly to challenges that span all health security threats, like early detection of infection and personal notification to act, control, and treat infections, or even sepsis. We have some unique funding capabilities and responsive timelines that increase the agility of BARDA to respond to rapidly emerging threats with innovative technologies. We partner with companies and teams offering solutions to a broad range of national health security threats. DRIVe partnering approaches vary depending on the project. BARDA has two currently open solicitations, our EZ-BAA for awards under $749K and our BARDA BAA for more advanced projects.
DRIVe has been 100% focused on developing and delivering needed capabilities to address COVID-19. We temporarily shifted our usual DRIVe areas of interest in order to focus our EZ BAA intensively on COVID-19 medical countermeasure development at this time. Not surprisingly, many of the technologies that we were already supporting in our DRIVe portfolio to Solve Sepsis or identify early infection were nicely suited to also address SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. To add to these efforts, we are soliciting proposals and quickly making awards for the development of SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic tests, vaccines, and advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing technologies. In the three months since we broadened our aperture and published the EZ BAA COVID-19 special instructions, we’ve received and processed more applications than we did over an entire year at a normal operating pace. Incredibly, we’ve been able to maintain our rapid review turnaround cycles, awarding the first COVID-19 diagnostics contracts in as few as twelve days.
Follow us @BARDA on LinkedIn and check out our evolving portfolio on medicalcountermeasures.gov. To support ongoing U.S. government COVID-19 medical countermeasure development efforts, BARDA is pleased to offer our EZ-BAA and BARDA BAA. These open solicitations seek abstract or white paper submissions for select COVID-19 medical countermeasures. For up-to-date information on the BARDA COVID-19-focused areas of interest, you can visit our COVID-19 EZ BAA website or the BARDA website, which also describes a number of other ways to engage with us one-on-one. Interested parties can also request a CoronaWatch Meeting. This is an interagency, single point of entry portal for vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostic assays, or other products and services related to COVID-19. These market research submissions allow ASPR, BARDA, NIH, NIAID, FDA, CDC, and DoD colleagues to also become aware of potential COVID-19 projects in development.
We are working closely with our HHS agencies—NIH, FDA, and CDC—and other federal partners to leverage our efforts when able and in this way build the most robust portfolio of products and technologies to address our shared areas of interest. HHS, DoD, Homeland Security, and others have pandemic preparedness programs that collaborate with each other, from early research to advanced development, procurement, and deployment. During a public health emergency response, it is vital that we are in constant communication with our federal partners along the acquisition spectrum. BARDA, NIH, CDC, and the FDA complement each other across the research, development, procurement, and deployment of medical countermeasures. BARDA typically focuses on the advanced research and development of medical countermeasures, partnering with industry to provide funding and expertise to pursue FDA approval, clearance or authorization, and ultimately make available safe and effective medical countermeasures to protect Americans. For the COVID-19 response, each agency is working more closely and coordinated on medical countermeasure development than we have ever seen in the past. To be successful, it is critical that we are all coordinated and hyper-focused on accelerating the development of life-saving medicines, vaccines, and diagnostics to halt this pandemic.
Anyone developing a technology is encouraged to submit a request with a short description of their technology to the intergovernmental COVID-19 CoronaWatch program at medicalcountermeasures.gov. Submissions to this portal are reviewed by BARDA and our federal government partners, relevant technologies that meet an agency’s needs are invited to have a market research meeting. As needs emerge and change in response to the COVID-19 pandemic agencies have the ability to query previous submissions. The interagency COVID-19 CoronaWatch program was launched specifically to help companies streamline the process of preparing their proposals. Before companies would have to reach out separately to multiple agencies however, with this portal they only have to submit one request which is accessible to all interested U.S. government agencies which saves them valuable time and resources.
A great start would be to consult with one of the accelerators in our BARDA DRIVe Accelerator Network. These accelerators were selected through a competitive process to work with us as extensions of ourselves, scouting and coaching potential applicants for BARDA’s areas of interest. We work with them regularly and they are up to speed on the latest information about our EZ BAA and BARDA BAA, and COVID-19 focus areas.
The best way is to review the EZ-BAA and BARDA BAA solicitations themselves, where companies can find in-depth information applicable to their technology. Typically, technologies submitted to the BAA are more advanced in technological readiness than technologies submitted to the EZ-BAA.
BARDA has worked successfully with companies of all sizes and scopes, from small entrepreneurial groups to biotech groups to large multinational organizations. So, there really is not a set of “common” traits for awardees, it varies in terms of what companies are offering and the technological readiness of their products and technologies. Both of these BAAs describe a wide variety of our product interest areas aimed at getting the COVID-19 response capacity developed and deployed as quickly as possible but also looking toward long-term solutions to this problem that will be around for some time and strengthen our everyday health system. The criteria are explained in each BAA, but again our Accelerator Network can help and you can always reach out to us too, we are happy to answer questions.
The process itself hasn’t changed. BARDA works side by side with its industry and start-up partners. BARDA is not just a funding organization, we provide project support, technical expertise, and oversight throughout the partnership. BARDA partners can access a deep pool of product development, regulatory, manufacturing as well as non-clinical and clinical subject matter experts throughout the partnership. BARDA program teams meet regularly with partners to ensure projects are running smoothly and issues are being addressed as quickly as possible.
Yes: please follow us on social media (@BARDA) for all the latest on the COVID-19 response and our other mission areas. You can also visit our COVID-19 Portfolio Page to see what companies we have partnered with to end the pandemic. And one more thing – we are hiring! You can see recent postings on BARDA’s Twitter @BARDA and BARDA LinkedIn pages as well as on USAJOBS.gov.
Biolocity is a philanthropic, multi-institutional network supporting university medical technology commercialization in the southeast. Through a combination of investment, project management, consulting, and educational programming, Biolocity provides early-stage, patient impacting technologies with the resources needed to reach critical commercialization milestones.
Christina Wessels
Program Coordinator, Biolocity
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Emory University & Georgia Institute of Technology
This year’s cohort of seven interns come from diverse backgrounds, but all share an interest in commercialization. They play a crucial role in our funding cycle, assisting with technology diligence and market assessments for projects under consideration for funding. Over the next four months, this cohort will work closely with our team to better understand the many factors that impact commercialization and receive guidance on how to assess market potential for early stage technologies. If you are interested in learning more about the Biolocity internship program, visit our internship opportunities page.
The Biolocity Team is excited to partner with Additional Ventures to assist in identifying promising research at both Georgia Tech and Emory University that provides solutions for single ventricle heart defects. To learn about this partnership, read more here.
