News
A team of young University of Cape Town researchers attended a workshop on Translational Research, Health Innovation and Commercialization in Durban. The event targeted early-stage health and life science researchers and postgraduates from the participating institutions with the objective of introducing participants to the concepts and tools required to plan the translation of their research findings towards commercialisation, healthcare delivery and social impact.
RC&I has created two new guides that provide an overview of how medical devices and pharmaceutical products reach the market.
The Route to Market (R2M) series is being developed using funding from the Department of Science and Technology’s National Intellectual Property Office (NIPMO). Each booklet focuses on a specific sector/product type and highlights the key steps and considerations in bringing such a product to market in that sector – with an emphasis on the local South African context, i.e. bringing research outputs into the marketplace and achieving “impact through innovation”.
The University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Department of Computer Science is set to enjoy a major boost with the naming of Dr Melissa Densmore, senior lecturer and Information and Communications Technologies for Development (ICT4D) staff member, as a recipient of the prestigious $500 000 National Academies Keck Futures Initiative (NAKFI) Challenge grant.
Over the past decade or so, there has been a massive shift in cancer research toward discovering more targeted therapeutic alternatives to chemotherapy and radiation. Subscribing to this approach, Professor Virna Leaner, head of the Division of Medical Biochemistry at UCT, and her group of researchers have dedicated their academic work to looking for novel cancer biomarkers that could serve as therapeutic targets.