St. Louis is vying for a $160 million grant that leaders and academics hope will turbocharge the neuroscience sector and rectify entrenched health disparities throughout the region.
The effort is part of an application to be one of the next National Science Foundation’s Regional Innovation Engines.
The idea is to help assets in higher education, nonprofits, state and local governments and other organizations converge around developing a single sector ripe for innovation, said Justin Raymundo, vice president of innovation ecosystem building at BioSTL.
“Really to bring communities, largely left out of the tech boom at the turn of the 21st century, to create more concentrations of research discovery and see those discoveries turn into products, jobs [and] opportunities,” he said.
The region won a $1 million grant from the NSF last year to develop a strategic plan.
NEURO360, the St. Louis proposal, is led by Washington University and BioSTL. It aims to build upon the region’s existing prowess in neuroscience research and develop those discoveries into new products, treatments and approaches to medicine, said Eric Leuthardt, MD, chief of Washington University’s division of neurotechnology and one of NEURO360’s principal investigators.
“We are at this inflection point,” he said. “As we understand the nervous system better, we are going to be able to address deep and pressing needs in the near future because we understand how the brain works.”
It can help spur better responses to conditions like depression, stroke and Alzheimer’s that are related to the brain or nervous systems, Leuthardt said. And these advancements can form the basis for applications, companies and technology that can then spur local economic growth, he added.
“This understanding of the nervous system has broad scale ability to impact people’s lives, and it should translate to that,” Leuthardt said. “It should become real and tangible, whether it be a product, a drug, a change in policy or a new way of teaching children.”
At Wash U alone, Leuthardt said there are dozens of examples of research that are prime for commercialization and part of the NEURO360 program needs to include developing a pathway that gets innovations to the market. That includes factors like where to source capital, how to develop intellectual property or how to identify the entrepreneurs or companies who can develop great research into a commercial product, he said.
“It’s an embarrassment of riches in terms of knowledge and capabilities,” he said. “We don’t have to bring that in, we already have it. It’s really creating a structure to allow that next level to happen.”