Tuesday, February 20, 2007

MicroRx: Infectious Disease Supercluster


Colorado State University announced MicroRx, an entity designed to ally academia and commercial enterprise to ultimately accelerate the bench-to-bedside process. Infectious Disease is the focus of this first CSU Supercluster which was borne out of CSU Ventures, lead by Mark Wdowik.

CSU is an international center of excellence for the study of infectious disease. The university was recently awarded a $40M grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, $17M from the NIH for the Regional Biocontainment Lab, and the CDC’s $80M research lab on the CSU Foothills Campus just to name a few of the headline poppers. University foci include mycobacterial diseases like tuberculosis, vector borne disease like West Nile fever and malaria, retroviral diseases like AIDS, and prion diseases like chronic wasting disease. Other CSU projects focus upon antimicrobial resistance, development of new approaches to control mosquitoes, ticks and other disease-carrying arthropods and food safety.

MicroRx is designed to now aid the movement of research discoveries to the market.

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