University of Louisville bioengineering researchers will use a $3.33 million award from the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation to help commercialize promising academic innovations into medical solutions to benefit patients.

The five-year Coulter Translational Partnership Award has the ultimate goal of focusing on outcomes to save, extend and improve patients' lives.

The Coulter Foundation will form a working partnership with UofL's bioengineering department to promote translational research. The key UofL partners will be J.B. Speed School of Engineering, through Robert Keynton, the lead researcher and bioengineering department chair; the School of Medicine, through Mark Slaughter and the Office of Technology Transfer, through Holly Clark and Melea East, interim co-directors. There also will be an oversight committee of industry representatives, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and clinical doctors that will help determine which projects to fund.

This is an opportunity, Slaughter said. It coalesces these emergent centers of excellence within the University of Louisville, and will allow them to take these new ideas and decide relatively quickly what is clinically important and make it applicable to improve patient care, quality of life and outcomes. And that's the ultimate goal.

The award will fund five to six projects per year that are created by engineers and clinicians working side by side.