NIH Team Wins Scientific Excellence Award for Entrepreneur Training Program

Original Story (Source): NIH’s Nucleate Team Wins Alnylam Scientific Excellence Award (July 2025 NIH Technology Transfer Community Newsletter), by Michael Pollack, NCI

Congratulations to the team from NIH on winning the Alnylam Scientific Excellence Award at a technology pitch competition in Baltimore, Maryland, on May 14, 2025.

The award is associated with the Nucleate Activator program, an entrepreneurship-training initiative that helps graduate students and postdoctoral fellows transform cutting-edge technologies into market-ready innovations. This was the first time that an NIH cohort participated in the program. The NIH team named BAIT selected a technology from the National Cancer Institute—a dendritic cell therapy that uses tumor fragments for specific targeting—and developed a marketing pitch for the technology.

Team BAIT was led by Mitchell Sun (NCI), and included TingYi Lin (NEI), Ben Sievers (NIH VRC), Mona Miraftab (NCI), Jessica Tang (NINDS), Ji Bussgang (NINDS), and Rahul Subramaniam (NIBIB). Notably, Mitchell is an NIH Oxford-Cambridge (OxCam) graduate student who is developing the NCI technology in the NeuroOncology Branch, Center for Cancer Research, NCI.

The NIH team received training in biomedical invention development, commercialization, and entrepreneurship from the Activator program and NCI’s Technology Transfer Ambassadors Program (TTAP). The team was mentored by Daniel Reich (NINDS), Steve Ferguson (NIH Office of Technology Transfer), Kate Stigliano (NIH Clinical Center), Lauren Nguyen-Antczak (NCI Technology Transfer Center), and Michael Pollack (NCI Technology Transfer Center). Lauren Nguyen-Antczak played a key role in coordinating, shepherding, and providing guidance to the NIH team. Michael Pollack manages the NCI technology involved, and provided guidance to the team about the patenting, licensing, and commercial development of this technology.

Thanks are also due to the thoughtful critiques of the draft pitch from a panel of experienced advisors, including Matt Tremblay (CEO, Blackbird Labs), John Sullivan (Entrepreneur in Residence – SEED, NIH), Gary Robinson (Program Officer, NCI), and Andrew Sinkoe (CEO of Sesh, Inc. and a former NCI fellow). Their expertise helped the team refine their pitch, culminating in this well-deserved recognition.