The Helmholtz Association has given green light for the funding of start-up projects for three new product ideas. Two have been developed by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT): A pen that helps detect motoric weaknesses of children beginning to write and a miniaturized biochip for cell-based bioresearch will be funded with EUR 100,000 each in the coming year.
At KIT, the engineers Dr.-Ing. Hans-Georg Enkler, Dipl.-Ing. Markus Dickerhof, and Dipl.-Ing. Benjamin Hessenauer from the Institute of Product Development and the Institute for Materials Research III will develop to maturity a pen for children having difficulties in writing. The cooperation partner is the Kinderzentrum Maulbronn (children’s’ center Maulbronn). The pen is equipped with sensors to measure the movements and forces during writing. Physicians and therapists will be enabled to better identify individual problems of children and to provide specific help. The start-up “iuvaris” is aimed at commercializing this product together with adequate learning software.
The second start-up is named “Cell Arrays” and comes from the KIT Institute of Toxicology and Genetics. The founders Dr. Pavel Levkin and Florian Geyer have developed a method to produce novel highly dense arrays for microsamples in bioresearch. Using these arrays, capacities of more than 50,000 (micro)samples can be reached on standard microtiter plates, such that the complete human genome, for instance, can be studied on a single biochip having the size of a palm. The time and costs needed for the experiments are reduced considerably.
The third start-up project funded by the Helmholtz Association is a robust recording unit for geosignals from the Helmholtz Center Potsdam Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum GFZ.
The Helmholtz Enterprise Fund provides institutes with funds to finance additional staff in a start-up phase. In this way, researchers can expedite their start-up project without other tasks at the institute remaining unfulfilled. The costs of up to EUR 200,000 per project are borne equally by the Helmholtz Association and the respective Helmholtz center. The funding period is one year.
Being “The Research University in the Helmholtz Association”, KIT creates and imparts knowledge for the society and the environment. It is the objective to make significant contributions to the global challenges in the fields of energy, mobility, and information. For this, about 10,000 employees cooperate in a broad range of disciplines in natural sciences, engineering sciences, economics, and the humanities and social sciences. KIT prepares its 22,800 students for responsible tasks in society, industry, and science by offering research-based study programs. Innovation efforts at KIT build a bridge between important scientific findings and their application for the benefit of society, economic prosperity, and the preservation of our natural basis of life. KIT is one of the German universities of excellence.