Demonstrator and Venture Challenge awards

Description

NWO Domain Applied and Engineering Sciences (AES) has awarded funding to six Demonstrators. This will allow researchers to further develop their results into a commercial product. AES also offers five starting entrepreneurs in the life sciences the opportunity to bring their service or product to the market via the Venture Challenge. In total, one million euros is involved.

Demonstrator

Demonstrator is one of NWO's valorisation instruments. With it, researchers further develop their results to make them attractive to the market. Six projects were awarded funding in the 2022 round of Demonstrator. With funding from this program, researchers manufacture a product or service in the form of a demonstration model. The model serves as a showcase to enable a market introduction of that technology.

For example, researchers are going to develop a sustainable electric motor for agricultural vehicles, which must be able to generate a lot of power at low rpm and low speeds. Immunologists are also going to further develop a new technique for quickly detecting T-cell immunity in blood samples. A user-friendly and more intuitive way of converting databases into comprehensible graphs is also being further refined.

For the first time, applications for this call also had to meet the international standard of 'Societal Readiness Level 4'. This means that the problem - which the technology seeks to solve - has already been validated through a pilot. In such a pilot project, the proposed impact is demonstrated in a relevant environment, in addition to the societal readiness to embrace the technology. 

Demonstrator is open for applications annually. A maximum of 160 thousand euros can be applied for per project. The new round is expected to open in November.

These are the six granted projects, in order of project number:

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Novel Technique for Measuring T Cell Immune Responses in Blood Samples - prof. dr. G. van den Bogaart, University of Groningen (19794)

Further development of a new technique to rapidly determine T cell immunity in blood samples.

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