Boston University and Fraunhofer Create Alliance

Boston University (BU, Boston, MA, USA) and its College of Engineering are joining Fraunhofer Gesellschaft (Munich, Germany) to create the Boston University-Fraunhofer Alliance for Medical Devices, Instrumentation and Diagnostics. BU and Fraunhofer will jointly fund the five-year, U.S.$5 million alliance, which aims to develop arrays for diagnostic applications.

Andrew Sharon, a BU engineering professor and director of the Fraunhofer Center for Manufacturing and Innovation, said that the alliance will create disposable chips for molecular-level disease diagnosis. The firm will fabricate DNA and peptide arrays and perform translational research with the medical school. An optically guided colon-cancer detection and treatment system is a promising innovation also under consideration for initial support by the alliance.

The alliance seeks to take advantage of the two institutions' respective strengths. Advanced biomedical engineering research being conducted throughout BU's College of Engineering, College of Arts and Sciences, and Medical School, generally proceeds to the laboratory bench level. Fraunhofer hopes to take these innovations and convert them into working medical devices and instruments that can be licensed to existing companies or new, spin-off ventures.

Fraunhofer Gesellschaft is very active in biomedical research. Current activities include array-based diagnostics, medical imaging, surgical micro-tools development, and other novel devices and instrumentation. The Fraunhofer Center for Manufacturing Innovation was established at Boston University in 1994. The center scales up basic research into advanced industrial technologies that meet the needs of client companies both locally and globally.



Related Links:
Boston University
Fraunhofer Gesellschaft