New Orleans BioInnovation Center

Who we are

The New Orleans BioInnovation Center is a private, not-for-profit business incubator supporting Louisiana innovators in biotech by providing commercialization services, premier facilities, and a comprehensive support network to help start and scale globally competitive life science companies.

Funding Requirements

We work on behalf of the US federal government to source startups related to the BARDA DRIVe program. Funding can be up to $750K through the program. Current types of companies we are looking for:

Digital MCMs: Develop novel digital technologies that accelerate the response to health security threats. Proposed solutions should increase access, reduce cost, or more rapidly disseminate medical countermeasures, such as diagnosis and risk assessment capabilities, by:
Capitalizing on broadly available and easily accessible digital platforms such as smartphones and web applications and/or
Combining novel analytic approaches, such as AI/ML, with broadly accessible data sources such as images, audio, sensors, or user data from smartphones/wearable devices; or other novel digital data sources.
Digital health tools include smartphone, web, and telehealth applications, data sets, or algorithms that are deployable on commonly available digital devices.

Healing Lungs: Address gaps in ARDS treatment by developing innovative technologies that enable oxygen delivery and gas exchange for severe ARDS patients, prevent secondary lung injury, and do not resort to mechanical ventilation or positive air pressure systems.
Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) patients not responding to mechanical ventilation are placed on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) as a last resort. This intervention remains labor-intensive, costly, high risk, and is only available at a few specialized centers. DRIVe envisions improved access to affordable, effective, and safe treatment options like ECMO that can be administered outside of the intensive care unit, for severe ARDS patients. Healing Lungs seeks to develop next-generation ECMO advances and oxygen delivery vehicles superior to currently available interventions.

Host-based Diagnostics: When health is compromised by an infection or injury, the body's response can trigger a cascade of protective activities. Host-based diagnostics (HBDs) focus on these responses, not the threat itself, providing a threat agnostic complement to pathogen-based diagnostics. They can aid clinical decision making by providing insight into a patient's past infectious status, current immunity, infection severity, or future status, including the trajectory of deterioration to severe outcomes (eg; sepsis). These threat agnostic approaches not only have potential to map an individual patient's status- HBDs can also help address existing gaps in our ability to respond to unidentified threats.This program will bolster national preparedness by supporting the development, validation, and regulatory approval of host-based tools and approaches, with an emphasis on assessment of the clinical utility. HBDs encompass a broad range of technologies capable of leveraging various data types from an individual such as genomic biomarkers, cellular responses and physiological data, which may be analyzed by integrated algorithms.
Our current areas of focus include:
Pathogen agnostic detection of infection, severity, or health deterioration in clinical settings outside of the hospital
Demonstrate the clinical utility of HBDs for changing patient outcomes
Utilize methods (e.g., cell-mediated immunity, epigenetic markers) that can inform on a patient's prior infectious status or current status of immunity
Stratification of patient subpopulations to guide clinical trial design or identify appropriate treatment

Host-Directed Therapeutics: When health is compromised by infection, insult, or injury, the body's response can trigger a cascade of immune dysregulation and organ dysfunction, leading to poor patient outcomes. Treatments aimed at modulating these responses, known as host-directed therapeutics (HDTs), have the potential to prevent, reduce or mitigate immediate and long-term harm through promoting a balance of healthy cells, tissue, immune system or organ function.HDTs by design target universal responses, representing a threat agnostic approach for a variety of health security threats, including pandemics. They offer a significant advantage for pandemic preparedness by eliminating the need for pathogen identification and pathogen specific treatment, which is a critical capability when facing an emerging or previously unknown pathogen. While HDTS may be used for the treatment of non-infectious conditions (e.g., high blood pressure, autoimmune disorders, oncology), they have not been widely applied to health security problems due to perceived challenges in development or ROI. To catalyze broader implementation of HDTs, we are supporting development of new or repurposed drugs, biologics, or devices.
Our current areas of HDT focus include:
Interventions to prevent or reduce infection progression to severe outcomes
Therapies that improve long term outcomes and prevent health deterioration
Patient stratification to subtype populations for improved clinical management.

Home Diagnostics: Telehealth is now widespread, but most routine testing still requires visits to a clinic or lab. This program is developing disruptive platform technologies to collect and analyze biological samples at home. This technology could revolutionize diagnostics, chronic disease management, and even clinical research, providing better access to care and a more disaster-resilient health care system.
Support the development and validation of new platform technologies for simple, rapid multiplexed analysis of biological specimens in the home setting.
These novel technologies:
Use non-invasive and minimally invasive samples to provide quantitative information about a patient's health status
Are readily adaptable to a broad menu of test panels to cover a wide range of disease states as well as standard health assessments
Offer rapid results for interpretation by health care providers.

Anti-viral therapies are a critical medical countermeasure against acute viral infections and their long-term sequelae. For many viruses, such as filoviruses, the commercial market provides limited incentives for product developers to evaluate promising candidates. Antiviral therapeutics are generally advanced for a single indication, however they may have efficacy against multiple related viruses due to conserved mechanisms and host/virus proteins.

With the Repurposing Drugs for Biological Threats (ReBooT) program, DRIVe and BARDA's Antivirals and Antitoxins (AVAT) branch aim to support the testing and evaluation of candidate antiviral therapeutics that have been licensed or developed past Phase 1 clinical trials for another indication, but which have a mechanism of action likely to be effective against filoviruses.Drug repurposing, or label expansion, is a strategy that is used to identify new uses for approved or late-stage therapeutics beyond their original clinical indication. With ReBooT, efforts are focused on repurposing safe direct-acting and host-directed therapeutics that have the potential to reduce the mordidity and mortality associated with filovirus infection.
Program funding will support proof of concept studies and help fill critical knowledge gaps to include:
Identifying candidates that can be repurposed, either licensed or beyond Phase 1, with a mechanism of action suggestive of efficacy against the filoviruses
Supporting critical evaluations to determine if the candidate warrants future consideration for product development

Strengthening our ability to respond to physical threats is a critical part of BARDA's strategy. Exposure to substantial doses of ionizing radiation, causes widespread cell death and leads to a spectrum of injuries across multiple organs, also known as Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS). Due to the systemic multi-organ pathologies of ARS, fast-acting, effective medical countermeasures (MCM) are needed.
With the Repurposing and Advancing Innovations Against Rad/Nuc (RePAIR) program, DRIVe and BARDA's Chemical, Biological, and Nuclear (CBRN) Division aim to support the testing and evaluation of repurposed drugs that have potential efficacy against ARS.Drug repurposing, or label expansion, is a strategy that is used to identify new uses for approved or late-stage therapeutics beyond their original clinical indication. With RePAIR, efforts are focused on repurposing licensed or late-stage therapeutics as MCMs against ARS.
This includes therapeutics for treating:
Cell Death
Vascular Injury
Bleeding/Coagulation
Ischemia

Value add

Provides life sciences startups with expert consulting, access to state-of-the-art labs and office space, grant and BioChallenge funding support, strategic mentorship, networking opportunities, and visibility to investors and industry partners.