Fall 2026 Provost’s Proof of Concept awards announced

Dr. Kimberly Gramm, Tenghuan "Talia" Ge and Dr. Victor J. Thannickal (photo by Cheryl Gerber)

The Tulane Innovation Institute, in partnership with Provost Robin Forman, awarded three Provost's Proof of Concept (PPOC) Fund grants Tuesday, Oct. 20, to researchers developing new ways to understand and treat disease through the brain and nervous system. The projects include an artificial intelligence platform for evaluating drugs for brain disorders, a nasal spray to aid recovery after spinal cord injury and an experimental treatment for Type 2 diabetes that targets a neural pathway involved in blood sugar control.

The fund helps Tulane University researchers move their findings beyond the lab and publications toward technologies that could be licensed or launched as spinouts. It covers work that federal grants often do not, such as customer discovery, product development, regulatory planning, intellectual property analysis and the early testing needed to attract industry partners. The fund is administered by the Innovation Institute's Robert L. Priddy Innovation Lab.

Now in its eighth cycle, the fund awarded three teams $ 50,000 each after a competitive review process that drew applications from across the university. The honorees were recognized at the eighth Open Medical Innovation Challenge (MIC) Night, a signature Innovation Institute event that celebrates early-stage health, medical and wellness ideas.

"The hardest stage to fund is the one between a promising finding and something a company or investor can evaluate as potentially promising," said Kimberly Gramm, David and Marion Mussafer Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer at the Tulane Innovation Institute. "This fund exists for that gap. We have data on 12 projects that have concluded, and those projects have gone on to raise more than $9 million in additional funding, which demonstrates how this catalyst program brings value and closes the 'gap' to further advance Tulane technologies."

Since March 2023, 26 teams have received over $1.3 million in PPOC grant funding. Seven spinout companies have been created by PPOC teams, and the program has given more than 55 students the opportunity to work on research projects. This cycle's applications represented six Tulane schools: the School of Medicine, the School of Science and Engineering, the Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, the School of Architecture, the School of Social Work and the School of Liberal Arts.

Tenghuan "Talia" Ge, senior project manager at the School of Medicine, is leading a team building an artificial intelligence and laboratory platform to improve the development of medicines that treat brain diseases safely and effectively. Designing drugs that can cross the blood-brain barrier is difficult, and many treatments fail after years of work and billions of dollars in investment. The team aims to create a standardized service that academic and industry partners can use to design and evaluate drug candidates more efficiently. The platform will first focus on inflammation associated with Alzheimer's disease, stroke, traumatic brain injury and rare immune disorders. Support from the fund will help the team refine its blood-brain barrier modeling tools, expand testing of compounds that target key enzymes and standardize its research workflows.

The team also includes Zhen Zhao, associate professor of biomedical informatics and genomics; Xiangming Zha, professor of neurosurgery; and Matthew E. Burow, associate professor of medicine, associate chair of research in the John W. Deming Department of Medicine and associate director for translational research at the Tulane Cancer Center.

"I'm grateful to my extraordinary team for their partnership, to the mentors and colleagues at Tulane who sharpened this work, and to the Provost's Proof of Concept Fund for backing it. The platform we are building is a product of collaboration with university labs. This award lets us accelerate that work, and it's also a huge recognition of what we have accomplished this year," said Ge. Ge also pitched the platform at the Open MIC Night portion of the event.