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This article was originally published at

The Global Business Development division of the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT) announced that seven University of Colorado companies and three researchers are among the awardees of the Proof of Concept and Early-Stage Capital and Retention grants through OEDIT’s Advanced Industries Accelerator Program. These grants help promote the growth and sustainability of advanced industries in Colorado by driving innovation, commercialization, and public-private partnerships that move this vital aspect of Colorado’s economy forward in communities across the state.

“Colorado is increasingly recognized as a national and global leader in the advanced industries, and this program plays an important role in that success,” said Michelle Hadwiger, Global Business Development Director. “Whether it’s in federally recognized innovative industries like quantum and space, or in areas like health that consistently reimagine solutions that improve the way healthcare is delivered, these disruptive technologies create valuable opportunities for our workforce.”

The Proof of Concept grant is intended to help Colorado research institutions speed up applied research in the advanced industries as well as commercialize products and services in partnership with the private sector. The Early-Stage Capital and Retention grant supports businesses commercializing innovative and disruptive technologies in the advanced industries that will be created or manufactured in Colorado.

The Advanced Industries Accelerator Program received 117 applications this grant cycle, which were reviewed in a multi-stage process by committees of business, technical and financial experts in the seven advanced industries. Final recommendations were approved by the Economic Development Commission on November 21, 2024, and the awards announced today represent a total of $5,438,734 in funding.

The next application cycle for Proof of Concept and Early-Stage Capital and Retention Grants will open on January 1, 2025 and applications will be due February 28, 2025.

��������Ƶ Proof of Concept Grants

• University of Colorado Denver, PI Nam Bui - Denver, CO $150,000: Developing an in-ear blood pressure monitoring system for remote and accurate blood pressure measurements.
• University of Colorado Denver, PI Melanie Joy - Denver, CO $150,000: Developing a phosphate adsorption device that treats hyperphosphatemia of end-stage kidney disease.
• University of Denver, PI Seyed Reza Mahmoodi - Denver, CO $150,000: Developing an electrode-integrated microwell array platform for non-invasive, multi-modal monitoring of 3D cell cultures.

��������Ƶ Startups Early-Stage Capital and Retention Grants

• AmplifiedSpace Inc. - Lafayette, CO $250,000: AmplifiedSpace is developing digital power systems that use rapid-manufacturing and on-orbit configurability to get spacecraft into orbit as fast as possible.
• Latimer Controls Inc. - Boulder, CO $100,000: Latimer Controls has developed a utility-scale solar plant generation control software that integrates with existing hardware to control solar plant generation in real time.
• Mana Battery Inc. - Denver, CO $250,000: Mana Battery is developing sodium battery electrolytes and sodium battery cells for electricity grid applications.
• Mesa Quantum  Inc. - Boulder, CO $500,000: Mesa Quantum Systems is developing mass manufacturable chip-scale atomic clocks to address the risk of GPS as a single point of failure.
• Octave Photonics LLC - Louisville, CO $500,000: Octave Photonics has developed a new rapid-fabrication service that utilizes advanced materials required by cutting-edge quantum applications.
• SentrySciences, Inc. - Longmont, CO $250,000: SentrySciences has developed a software solution that addresses analytical issues associated with manufacturing cell-based medicinal products.
• Sieyax - Broomfield, CO $199,850: Sieyax is developing a novel small therapeutic for treating various cancers, with an initial focus on medulloblastoma.

��������Ƶ the Advanced Industries Accelerator Program

The Advanced Industries Accelerator Program was created in 2013 to promote growth and sustainability in Colorado’s advanced industries by driving innovation, accelerating commercialization, encouraging public-private partnerships, increasing access to early stage capital and creating a strong infrastructure that increases the state’s capacity to be globally competitive. AIA encompasses five distinct grant programs: Proof of Concept, Early-Stage Capital and Retention, Collaborative Infrastructure, Export Accelerator, and Global Consultant Network.

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Founded by ��������Ƶ Boulder Professor Larry Gold in 2000, revolutionized protein measurement by developing a faster, cost-effective process to monitor the vast number of proteins in the human body. Gold’s discoveries and work at ��������Ƶ Boulder ultimately led to the creation of three spinout companies and a significant impact on global healthcare research and diagnostics.

Like most groundbreaking biotechnology companies, SomaLogic formed around a problem to solve—how to precisely measure the huge number of proteins in the human body. In 2000, when Larry Gold founded the company, measuring proteins was a time-consuming, costly and flawed process reliant on antibodies which are often not specific or sensitive enough detection tools.

Gold, who began teaching in the University of Colorado Boulder’s Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology (MCDB) department in 1970 (and served as its chair from 1988 to 1992), set out to do what no one else in the world was doing at the time—measure proteins more simply, cheaply and quickly. “My whole career at ��������Ƶ in MCDB, for 50 plus years, I have cared about measuring proteins,” said Gold.

Measuring proteins is so important because they’re the building blocks of life. The human body has at least 20,000 different proteins—and many more variants—working together in a complicated choreography. For example, collagen is a protein that structures skin, bones and teeth, while hemoglobin carries oxygen in blood. Proteins are also key to a well-functioning immune system, catalyze reactions in the body, and function as critical messengers within and between cells.

The ability to identify and count proteins is essential to biomedical research. Quantifying protein concentrations can help measure the presence and progression of diseases like cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s. Proteins are also often the targets of therapeutics—like aspirin for a headache—because of all the biochemical processes they carry out and their ability to intervene in pathologies with high specificity.

At the start, Gold’s lab could measure roughly 70 proteins by working long hours and sticking with the process despite occasional setbacks. For decades, said Gold, “From morning to night, seven days a week, oftentimes all night, I pipetted the same experiment thousands of times,” he said. “I don’t get bored doing the same thing over and over as long as we’re learning stuff—and we were.”

Gold said advancing their knowledge of proteins little by little while enjoying the camaraderie of life in the lab made long hours and ‘failed’ experiments tolerable, even enjoyable. “You can’t get upset when an experiment doesn't work, it’s a continuing, iterative process,” he said. “And I was doing it with good people–and that’s fun.”

Their process was cutting-edge at the time, but Gold knew that to crack the code on proteins, they’d need to be able to measure more and faster. That mission was the driving force in founding SomaLogic. “The tech for what we wanted to do didn’t exist, so we had to invent it on the spot,” Gold told an entrepreneur forum in 2015. “The basic idea was right about what we wanted to do, but the technology was harder than we thought,” he said.

Inventing those tools ultimately would take a decade and $200 million.

Imagining a bold future

In a way, proteins are like locks that Gold and his team were trying to find keys to. That matchmaking effort began decades ago, leading to an underlying innovation that fueled three spinouts and countless ongoing applications.

In the late 1980s, Gold and his team at ��������Ƶ Boulder, including PhD student Craig Tuerk, made a discovery that led to that original innovation. They were developing a technique to identify molecules that would selectively bind to other compounds (based on a piece of ribonucleic acid, or RNA, which Tuerk was studying).

Gold recalled the day when—two years into an experiment he’d asked Tuerk to do—they discovered they were onto something big. It was 1989, the day before Thanksgiving, and Tuerk came running out of the darkroom where he’d been working. “That afternoon, it was clear to us he had done something that had lots of possibilities for the future in biotech, and we covered a whiteboard with every idea we had,” said Gold.

It was a watershed moment that would change the biotech industry significantly. “Craig and I shared the most wonderful moment possible for scientists: we imagined a future in which RNAs were ‘shapes, not tapes’ or ‘strings, not things’ and were useful in the same way that monoclonal antibodies are useful,” Gold wrote in a .

In the process, the group isolated the first-known aptamers, a class of molecules with the unique binding ability—the keys—they were looking for. Then, they devised a system called SELEX (Systematic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential Enrichment), which could generate aptamers reliably and efficiently.

That discovery and development revolutionized biological research and medical diagnostics with wide-ranging applications from biomarker detection (indicating diseases like cancer and viral infections) to targeted therapies with fewer side effects.

From ��������Ƶ Boulder to the world

When a university startup is created, it is the culmination of years of research and significant work by the founders to build a compelling company vision, strategy and business model. The team at Venture Partners is here to help with each step along the way, including:

• intellectual property (IP) services,
• entrepreneurial training through the I-Corps^TM Hub West,
• a network of industry mentors,
• funding through the Lab Venture Challenge,
• the Ascent Deep Tech Accelerator,
• fast and simple IP licensing through the Licensing with EASE^® program,
• and many other resources.

Remarkable biotechnology breakthroughs don’t happen often, and even fewer enter the marketplace—and with such exceptional results. But Gold seems to have a knack for bringing them to light, combining decades of experience with a passion for inquiry. “You have to do the mundane work, but you also have to try to ask big questions, too,” he said, “Most people don't do that because they're afraid; our culture, in general, breeds a fear of failure.”

But to make the big discoveries, Gold said scientists have to take chances and cling to small victories in the process. “You should take some shots that are slightly ridiculous,” he said. “And enjoy all these little moments along the way where you learn something. The business of science for me is incredibly fun, and so that makes it easy to do for a long time.”

Since Gold and colleagues developed the SELEX platform, various academic and biopharma partners have also used it to develop new diagnostic tests, discover new drugs, accelerate their translation to clinical practice and reveal a deeper understanding of basic human biology and disease. In one such collaboration, Imperial College London is using a SomaLogic platform to analyze tens of thousands of biological samples as part of an investigation into how lifestyle, diet, genetic, metabolic and other factors affect the development of serious illnesses.

Soon after developing SELEX, Gold co-founded and served as co-director of research at Synergen, Inc., a biotechnology company later acquired by Amgen, Inc. and he founded NeXagen, Inc. (later called NeXstar Pharmaceuticals, Inc.), which merged with Gilead Sciences, Inc. in 1999. One major accomplishment of NeXstar centered on Macugen, a drug used to treat age-related macular degeneration and only the second-ever RNA aptamer to gain FDA approval.

Innovation that keeps on giving

Recognizing there was still work to be done in developing accessible diagnostics, Gold launched SomaLogic in 2000 where he served as CEO and chairman. He knew that focusing on proteomics—the field of measuring proteins—would be tough but, he wrote, “We also believed (and I continue to believe) that medical diagnostics was not as useful for patients and healthcare as it had to be, and that personalized medicine would depend on genomics and proteomics (and other ‘omics’ technologies).”

Based on the original SELEX technology developed at ��������Ƶ Boulder, SomaLogic pioneered the development of proteomics diagnostics and experiments. That is, they set out to create arrays of aptamers (keys) to fit thousands of proteins (locks) simultaneously to make disease discovery as simple as possible. Their unique “SOMAmers” can distinguish between nearly identical proteins and their SomaScan Assay is the first and only platform enabling 11,000 protein measurements from a tiny fluid sample.

Spinning three companies out of a single innovation developed at ��������Ƶ Boulder was an incredible feat, according to Bryn Rees, associate vice chancellor for research and innovation and managing director of Venture Partners at ��������Ƶ Boulder. “Larry was a pioneer and did this at a time when universities really weren’t set up to support that,” said Rees. “It was transformative. None of the whole innovation ecosystem that we currently have would exist without Larry doing that. The whole thing is a major ��������Ƶ Boulder success story.”

Venture Partners, the commercialization arm for ��������Ƶ Boulder, now has myriad programs to help would-be entrepreneurs launch their innovations into the world. “Fast forward to today where it’s a wholesale culture change, and the university really understands how intertwined the mission of the university is, with folks like Larry being able to spin their work out and impact so many, in his case, patients and labs around the world,” said Rees.

In 2021, SomaLogic went public, and in January 2024, it merged with Standard BioTools Inc., which uses next-generation technologies to transform scientific discoveries into better patient outcomes.

The sky’s the limit when thinking about how the discoveries originally made at ��������Ƶ Boulder will continue to be used to improve healthcare, Gold wrote. “…the future for applications of aptamers will be limited only by our imaginations…”

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