A Seed Fund Sprouts in the Desert

About 50 miles north of the commercial center of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, a unique university is attempting to set a new standard for technology transfer and innovation in the academic world. The King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), which opened its doors in September 2009, is using the full weight of its $10 billion endowment to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit among its students, faculty and staff.

A key part of that nurturing involves a seed-fund program that offers money and administrative support to anyone, including international entrepreneurs, who would like to develop ideas or discoveries into commercial ventures at KAUST. A successful applicant can be awarded up to $250,000 and receive additional contributions in the form of office and laboratory space and supportive services. Those added features include sophisticated labs that specialize in genomics, proteomics, nanofabrication and nanobiology. KAUST also includes an advanced visualization facility and supercomputing centers equipped with an IBM Blue Gene/P system, one of the world's fastest supercomputers, capable of more than 220 trillion floating-point operations per second (teraflops).

The seed fund is seen as an important part of KAUST's mission to expand Saudi Arabia's economic base, now heavily dependent on oil. According to Choon Fong Shih, the president of KAUST, "The program is designed to stimulate a continued 'deal flow'—a continuous pipeline of new products and novel business ideas."

Among the discoveries that have won seeding funding are unique silica nanospheres—dubbed KCC-1—that have a fibrous structure with a large surface area. Silica nanospheres have applications as carriers of molecules and as surfaces for catalysis. Because of its large surface area, KCC-1 could be useful in drug delivery, hydrogen storage and nano-composite materials, explains Vivek Polshettiwar, a senior research scientist who discovered the fibrous nanospheres during his first year at KAUST.

Another seed-fund winner might eventually transform the country's arid deserts into forests of date palms, according to the vision of Raju Thupran, a landscape engineer at KAUST. During his travels in the region, Thupran noticed that certain date palms were drought resistant, surviving in areas with little need for irrigation. "So we will identify these palms and try to identify the genes that are responsible for drought tolerance," says Thupran. The same methods would be used to identify genes that help certain palms tolerate saltwater and the red palm weevil. As the world's third largest producer of dates, Saudi Arabia could see its agricultural economy flourish.

With 13 applicants funded in the first two rounds, the round-three awards could start to turn KAUST into a biotechnology oasis in the desert.