Meet three of the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s Distinguished Innovators

they call it the value of death so to say so basically if you have like the proof of concept here and your commercial uh Target somewhere here so to go from here to there there is not many funding agencies no investors who want to finance this because this is the part where the risk is very high translating basic research discoveries into realized solutions that can benefit Society can be a huge challenge since 2020 researchers have been able to apply for distinguished innovator grants providing up to 6 million croner for 3 years to stimulate the translation of scientific findings to new products devices or technological platforms whenever you have a new drug or even Cosmetics there has been used a lot of animals for these type of tests to make sure that you don't have allergic reactions we can build these organs or tissues or cultures cells to study uh how drugs are being taken up so imagine we could just give you a disc where the only thing you need to do is to spin it and thereby you can actually Supply the cells with liquid and nutrients that they really need to grow the Nova Nordisk Foundation has extended the scope of the distinguished innovator grants from solely focusing on health to cover research on sustainability including Agriculture and food Quantum Computing and CO2 mitigating Technologies we found out that there are some colors that are very valuable and can be used in food applications particularly but that are present in their natural um Source in very small amounts uncovering them from their plants comes at a high cost and also with big environmental impact so we thought that if we could take their biosynthetic pathway for making these compounds and plug it into our optimized cell Factory then we could make this more sustainable and cheaper the grants aim to accelerate the commercialization of research findings and the development of Novel Technologies we are trying to put the spotlight on structural proteins and the viruses they can be targeted with with drugs and we're going to pursue that for for the next emerging viruses the challenge is of course to to raise money to get to the point where you say this is actually a valid point to be able to get so far that you can convince yourself and also the rest of the world that this is a good idea some advantages of this grant is that it's focused on Innovation but it's still in a university settings you don't have a venture capitalist for example that would like to follow you very closely so it's still the freedom and the flexibility it actually allows you to use some of the financing to hire a consultant who has expertise with in business and who will help you actually to develop such a business plan because otherwise any normal fundamental Grant would not allow you to do that if you really have a good idea you just have to believe in it and work on it and and do it uh which is of course not easy and it also takes a lot of work to do it but it also pays back because it's extremely inspiring to get to the point where it's also the use of it it is also taking some big steps and closing some doors behind you there's too few women in life science Innovation the more we show that this is possible the more I hope that it will Open the Eyes for all kind of people we need diversity people that think differently in these kind of career tracks you could say [Music]