Exercise Rx one of 10 winners of CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund
Exercise Rx, a key initiative of The Sports institute, has been awarded CoMotion’s Innovation Gap Fund, along with nine other research teams within the University of Washington.
Over 20 University of Washington research teams presented their innovations to a panel of judges for the fall CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund, held during a three-day virtual event in November. The projects ranged from rapid medical imaging, toxic contaminant cleanup, workplace injury prevention, and protein design applications that treat the deadliest complications of COVID-19.
In addition to advancing research and development, teams will also focus on business development-related activities such as customer discovery and market research. Some of the teams plan to license their innovations to existing companies while others have opted to pursue spinning off into their own companies. Regardless of their paths to commercialization, all winners have either secured patents or filed provisional applications. Several teams have taken advantage of other CoMotion programs and opportunities such as I-Corps and CoMotion DubPitch.
The CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund is a partnership between CoMotion and the Washington Research Foundation. The fund, which awards grants of up to $50,000 each, is open to any UW innovator who has disclosed their technology to CoMotion, supports research that could attract seed-stage investment or make a societal impact, and which has reached the conclusion of academic research grants. This cycle of the Innovation Gap Fund also included a funding track from the Washington Entrepreneurial Research Evaluation and Commercialization Hub (WE-REACH), a partnership that provides teaching and funding tools to accelerate the development of therapeutic, device, and diagnostic products to address significant challenges in health. CoMotion provides funding and program support to WE-REACH in sourcing, selecting, and ongoing guidance of the project teams.