Companies pursuing new ways to store organs, image the brain and capture positrons are among the first six firms that will be funded by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s Breakout Labs programme.
Thiel conceived of Breakout Labs to try to remedy what he sees as a failure of imagination in modern scientific and technological innovation: “We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters,” reads the website of the Founders Fund, a venture-capital firm of which Thiel is the managing partner, in a reference to the microblogging service Twitter.
Breakout Labs, run by the Thiel Foundation based in San Francisco, California, was announced in November and awards grants of up to US$350,000 each to companies that “dream big and want to build a tomorrow in which we all want to live,” Thiel said in a press release. The programme aims “to fill the funding gap that exists for innovative research outside the confines of an academic institution, large corporation, or government.”
Companies funded in this first round of grants span the gamut of scientific experience. Immusoft, a Seattle, Washington-based company that engineers immune cells, was spun out of Nobel laureate David Baltimore’s lab at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and Inspirotec, based in Chicago, is an air-analysis company that was co-founded by Julian Gordon, a developer of the Western-blot technique that is widely used in protein analysis.
But 3Scan, a San Francisco-based company developing a microscope to image the brain in three dimensions much more quickly than conventional techniques, is led by Todd Huffman, who left his doctoral neuroscience studies to commercialize the microscope after its inventor, Bruce McCormick, died in 2007.
Arigos Biomedical is developing ways to cool organs so they might one day be stored and banked for transplants. Longevity Biotech is making drugs using an “artificial protein technology” platform spun out of a lab run by Samuel Gellmann at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. And Positron Dynamics aims “to enhance the production and collection of positrons” that could one day be used in medical imaging or in space travel.