Featured Innovators
Chemistry of Life Processes Institute members are innovators and entrepreneurs. From customized biological systems for targeted drug delivery to novel diagnostics for COVID-19, our faculty work in teams to solve the biggest challenges in human health and bring their inventions to society. Read about their research, inventions and start-ups below and visit INVO, Northwestern’s Innovation and New Ventures Office, to learn more.
Guillermo Ameer, DSc
VesselTek Biomedical has developed synthetic resorbable biomaterials that stabilize soft-tissue grafts while promoting the body’s normal healing process.
Read more.
Vadim Backman, PhD
Preora Diagnostics uses optical technology called partial wave spectroscopic microscopy to examine cells at the nanoscale, which can help detect cancers.
Neil L. Kelleher, PhD
Kelleher is an internationally recognized scholar, leader, mentor, and teacher in modern proteomics and biological mass spectrometry, inventing powerful new methods to analyze and understand how human cells work at the molecular level. His startup Integrated Protein Technologies, Inc. has developed a platform that processes complex mixtures of proteins using the ubiquitous process of gel electrophoresis but enables the use of a mass spectrometer as the detector.
Yevgenia Kozorovitskiy, PhD
The long-range goal of K lab is to accelerate the understanding of neuromodulation and plasticity in the brain.
Its studies will also help facilitate the development of therapeutic applications, harnessing the power of neuromodulators to functionally reconfigure, and sometimes even literally rewire, neural circuits.
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Joshua Leonard, PHD
Joshua Leonard’s research group engineers novel biological systems that perform customized, sophisticated functions for applications in biotechnology and medicine.
Julius Lucks, PhD
Lucks’ research combines both experiment and theory to ask fundamental questions about the design principles that govern how RNAs fold and function in living organisms, HIs startup Stemloop Stemloop has developed a field test for water quality and more recently a test to check for COVID-19 contamination on surfaces and in water.
William Klein, PhD
Klein and his colleagues have pioneered the concept that memory loss in Alzheimer’s Disease is initiated by soluble amyloid beta oligomers, small neurotoxins that target particular synapses and cause their functional and structural degeneration.co-founder of Acumen Pharmaceuticals which is focused on the development of targeted therapies for Alzheimer’s disease.
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Thomas Meade, PhD
Meade has founded three biotech companies, Clinical Micro Sensors, PreDx and Ohmx which are developing hand-held devices for protein and DNA detection and bioactivated MR contrast agents for in vivo imaging of cancer.
Gabriel Rocklin, PhD
Rocklin’s mixed computational/experimental lab develops high-throughput methods for protein biophysics and protein design, with a focus on designing protein therapeutics.
Richard B. Silverman, PhD
Silverman is the inventor of pregabalin, a compound that became the blockbuster drug Lyrica®, marketed by Pfizer for fibromyalgia, neuropathic pain, spinal cord injury pain, and epilepsy. With the launch of his new company, His startup Akava Therapeutics’s lead compound, AKV9, is a protein aggregation inhibitor that improves the health of upper motor neurons that degenerate in motor neuron diseases
Danielle Tullman-Ercek, PhD
Tullman-Ercek’s research focuses on building biomolecular devices for applications in bioenergy, living batteries, and drug delivery, and she is particularly interested in engineering multi-protein complexes, such as the machines that transport proteins and small molecules across cellular membranes. Her start up Opera Bioscience has developed a microbial platform that can secrete soluble, correctly folded proteins out of the cell in a single step.