– We are very pleased that four of our six applications to FORNY2020 this spring were approved. The FORNY2020-funding allows these very good and interesting projects to continue their development towards verification, says Randi Elisabeth Taxt, Vice President of BTO.
This means that we now have 13 active projects in the FORNY2020 programme on behalf of our owners and partners. Since 2013, BTO has received funding from FORNY2020 for 18 projects with a total budget of 150 million Norwegian kroner.
Pilot project from UiB
The University of Bergen is involved in three of the applications that have been granted. They allocated additional resources on the application process this spring.
– University of Bergen had a pilot project this spring. The University Leadership, through the Division of Research Administration, provided the own financing needed in the applications for all the projects where it was necessary. This has contributed to their good results in this application round, says Mona Leirgulen, Controller in BTO.
About FORNY2020
The FORNY2020 programme is designed to trigger the value-creating potential of projects conducted at publicly-funded research institutions. The programme provides funding to newly-established companies based on these projects as well as to Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs) affiliated with the research institutions.
FORNY2020 was established in 2011. Since then, the program has supported in total 263 projects with 842 million Norwegian kroner.
Would you like to discuss a project that might be suitable for FORNY2020? Read more about it here.
The projects
A new MPCVD technology for diamond coating
Manufacturing companies worldwide are increasingly using more advanced materials that are lighter, stronger and have longer lifetime than their predecessors. However, the tools to process these materials are not sufficient, resulting in high costs for the replacement of tools and components. Current diamond coatings applied on these tools takes long time to grow, has impurities and are expensive. The diamond reactor technology proposed in this project aims to scale up the diamond coating process and cover large substrates with higher quality and higher growth rates than competition technology. The solution is a radical innovation within industrial lab diamond growth. Research institution: University of Bergen
CryoIT
CryoIT aims to verify the therapeutic concept of a novel immunotherapy for prostate cancer. If successful, the project has the potential to deliver Proof of Concept for a clinical approach that can become a valuable treatment option for both early and late prostate cancer, or alternatively, to be a central module of innovative combination strategies to fight prostate cancer. In addition, the treatment can be customized for various cancer types. FORNY2020 provides co-funding to finalize the ongoing verification phase of the project by monitoring the patients that have already been treated and by further clinical testing of a fortified version of the product. The project will also strengthen IP rights and perform extensive market analysis. Business development, in order to establish the roadmap to clinical implementation and to attract investors, will be a continuous activity. Research Institutions: University of Bergen and Haukeland University Hospital
ETEC
The ETEC vaccine project will further develop a vaccine against traveler’s diarrhea caused by ETEC (Enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli). The vaccine is based on mutant variants of the ETEC heat-stable toxin (ST). ETEC is one of the main causes of traveler’s diarrhea and may be responsible for up to 60% of all traveler’s diarrhea cases. Diarrhea annually kills approximately 700.000 children under five years of age. This makes it the second-leading cause of death among the childer under age of 5 in low- and medium income countries (LMICs). We will use FORNY funding to develop and test vaccine candidate(a) as well as establishing a human challenge model to test the vaccine candidate. Research Institutions: Uni Research and University of Bergen
Well Mend
One of the problems in the oil and gas industry is faulty Down Hole Safety Valves. The attempt to repair such valves often result in total replacement which in turn represents high cost and in excess of a year down time and lost production from the well. Together with industry specialists and researchers from Christian Michelsen Research, we have designed a solution to repair the valves in less than a month at 10% of the cost of a full replacement. The project will run from July 2017 through December 2018. Research Institutions: Christian Michelsen Research and Bergen University College.