Colorful petri dish with glass pipette inserted

Product Development Pathways

The Office of Translation to Practice (OTP) has created pathways for novel technology development. Structured product development opportunities include:

OTP Innovation Accelerator Awards

The OTP Innovation Accelerator Awards (OTP IAA) provide:

  • Awards ranging from $25,000 to $250,000 of direct funding that are available to investigators at all Mayo Clinic campuses, with submissions accepted year-round
  • Subawards including the successful Translational Product Development Fund
  • Access to an OTP technology development team

Goals

The goal of the OTP IAA is to help recipients improve patient care through either product development or practice initiatives. Selected projects support activities to impact and address the unmet clinical needs of patients, including:

  • Development of novel therapeutics, devices, diagnostics or other health care-related products that have the potential to change patient care
  • Development and implementation of novel practice initiatives that have the potential to change patient care

Examples of projects within the scope of the award include, but are not limited to:

  • Innovation addressing a human health need that does not have an adequate solution on the market
  • Medical device prototype design, development or manufacture
  • Manufacture of antibodies or drug candidates
  • Preclinical proof-of-concept testing of prototypes or validation of antibody or drug candidates
  • Use of preferred contract research organizations to carry out critical testing of drug candidates
  • Pilot projects to improve practice efficiency, workflow or testing of novel decision support tools
  • Developing artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, software, mobile apps or database technologies that improve patient care

Mayo Clinic-Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute (SBP Discovery) Collaboration for Drug Discovery

The Mayo Clinic-SBP Discovery Collaboration for Drug Discovery funds projects to accelerate the discovery of small-molecule therapeutics. Through the collaboration, teams are able to:

  • Access the expertise and infrastructure of SBP Discovery to configure scalable high-throughput screening (HTS)
  • Generate preliminary data for seeking additional funds through R01 grants from the National Institutes of Health or other sources
  • Generate small-molecule compounds to be commercialized in partnership with SBP Discovery

Awards do not provide any direct funds to the awardee, but rather fund access to SBP Discovery's world-class drug discovery expertise and infrastructure.

Goals

Selected projects in the Mayo Clinic-SBP Discovery Collaboration for Drug Discovery work toward one of two goals:

  • HTS platforms. The selected team develops and optimizes an HTS platform for a target provided by the investigator and performs a pilot screen to determine the platform's operating characteristics. The investigative team works directly with SBP Discovery to validate and optimize the screening approach using SBP Discovery's chemical library collection — containing more than 950,000 compounds — and screening infrastructure.
  • Chemical optimization. The selected team carries out chemical optimization of screening hits or early drug leads identified from prior awards' HTS platforms. Alternatively, the team may propose chemical matter to optimize. The team works with the SBP Discovery medicinal chemistry group and drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics group.

Support

Project funding for the Mayo Clinic-SBP Discovery Collaboration for Drug Discovery is provided by the Mayo Clinic Research Committee and the Center for Clinical and Translational Science (CCaTS).

Please direct any questions to otp@mayo.edu