Purdue Receives $100 Million to Endow Biomedical Research Institute

Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, has announced a $100 million gift from the Mann Foundation for Biomedical Engineering in Sylmar, California, to endow a new research institute.

The largest single endowment ever created for the university will fund Purdue's Alfred Mann Institute for Biomedical Development, which will work to enable the commercialization of innovative biomedical technologies that improve human health. The institute's agreement is between the Purdue Research Foundation, which oversees the Purdue Research Park, and the Mann Foundation. Researchers at the institute will use a multidisciplinary approach to advance research and help identify up to six new biomedical projects per year out of the hundreds at Purdue with commercialization potential. According to university president Martin C. Jischke, preferential consideration will be given to Indiana companies when the time comes to license technologies developed by the institute.

Alfred Mann, a successful serial medical device entrepreneur, said his goal in establishing the institute is to build a bridge between academia and industry to help move health-related products to doctors and their patients at an accelerated pace. The institute will have a board of ten directors composed equally of Purdue and Mann Foundation representatives, with Mann or his designee as chair.

The facility is the third of at least twelve such institutes the foundation plans to create at select entrepreneurial research universities by 2012. The first became operational in 2001 at the University of Southern California, and the second at the Technion University in Haifa, Israel, in 2006.

"Through Purdue's Alfred Mann Institute for Biomedical Development, we are participating in a new model of university technology transfer for a new century," Jischke said. "Through the Purdue Research Park, we already have an effective strategy for technology transfer, but we now can enhance our capabilities to meet the growing need to translate our faculty members' discoveries into useful products."