IU professor startup receives grant

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (Inside INdiana Business) — A startup by Indiana University associate professor Kan Shao has received a two-year, $2 million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Dream Tech will use the Small Business Technology Transfer Phase II grant to better evaluate chemical toxicity for companies, regulatory agencies and nonprofit organizations.

Shao says many industrial sectors use the product safety assessment stage to evaluate chemical toxicity.

“These include but aren’t limited to chemicals, pharmaceuticals, food, consumer products and pesticides,” he said. “Regulatory agencies at federal and state levels, scientific consulting companies, and research institutions also conduct chemical toxicity evaluations.”

The grant will allow them to develop a more reliable modeling and library system to support the assessment. Dream Tech had previously received a one-year STTR Phase I grant worth more than $245,000 from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.