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TTO Flanders provides access to the latest technologies and inventions of the Flemish universities and their associated universities of applied science and arts. For the full range of licensing opportunities, please visit the FRIS research portal of the Flemish government.
Here we highlight 10 recent technology offers.
With 382 million people affected worldwide, and 56 million in Europe, diabetes is a major health problem for which preventive and curative measures are needed. The treatment of choice is to preserve the functional beta cell mass, and to restore it when deficient.
The present technology provides an additive in form of a monomer that in small percentages can be added to the industrial lactide monomer and drastically increases the melt strength of the polymer (mainly polylactide, polylactic acid) after random co-polymerization. The resulting plastic has higher melt strength and melt elasticity, and renders it - contrary to pure PLA - easily applicable to elongational flow dominated applications such as film blowing, blow molding, fiber spinning and foaming.
We present a series of newly identified chemical compounds that can induce resistance of plants and crops against various plant fungal (e.g. Botrytis cinerea) and oomycete diseases (e.g. downy mildew) as well as insect pests. These compounds act as elicitors of the plant’s induced resistance (IR), without killing the disease/pest-inducing organism. The series was obtained through an extensive screening for IR inducing potential, of which one of the hits was selected (K14) and its structure further optimized, resulting in the current compound series. The mode of action of the best performing elicitor of the series was unravelled.
Low level systemic inflammation is associated with an increased incidence of inflammation associated diseases such as cardiovascular diseases (CVD), auto-immune diseases, depression disorder or obesity related metabolic diseases,…. pCRP is a well-known diagnostic marker of inflammation and infection and has been associated with many of the inflammation associated diseases to a certain extent. However, recently it became clear that a monomeric CRP isoform is the pronounced pro-inflammatory isoform of CRP rather than the well-known pentameric pCRP.
Vibration-based damage identification in civil engineering structures relies on analyzing changes in natural frequencies, damping factors, or modal displacements. However, the method faces challenges, as these parameters exhibit low sensitivity to certain types of damage, and monitoring modal strains and curvatures directly with sufficient spatial resolution is currently constrained by the small strain levels induced during ambient or operational excitation.
Impotence, or male erectile dysfunction (ED), is defined as the inability to get and keep an erection adequate for the performance of sexual intercourse. Worldwide, around 50% of all men above the age of 50 years old suffer from ED. Our in-house developed smart patch enables a continuous quality assessment of the rigidity and/or tumescence of a penis during a penile tumescent event. The device would assist in first instance people who have continuous or intermittent inability to achieve or maintain an erection for satisfactory sexual penetration, and thus having an ED.
The University of Antwerp (TPR) has developed advanced logistics chain cost calculation instruments for interurban and urban transport. This technology enables companies to see which mode or combination of modes is most cost-efficient, both from an operational and a societal point of view.
During scotopic electroretinography, patients need to remain in absolute darkness for 20 minutes. In case of anesthesia darkening of the operating room and monitoring screens is not feasible because of safety issues. With the newly developed light shielding box, ERG measurement can be performed under safe conditions and in accordance with the guidelines of the International Society for Clinical Electrophysiology.
Bovine mastitis, an inflammation of the cow’s udder that is usually caused by a bacterial infection, is the most important economic disease affecting dairy cattle. Bacteriophage-derived endolysins (“enzy-biotics”) are increasingly gaining attention due to their specificity, high killing efficacy, unlikely resistance development and rapid degradation in the environment. We engineered a novel and performant endolysin, NC5. NC5 has the potential to kill AMR streptococci, also in raw milk, accelerate bacterial killing, kill intracellular streptococci and eradicate streptococci-formed biofilms.
Current antiprotozoal treatments against protozoal infections are often ineffective, require a suboptimal compoundadministration route, face increasing resistance and are endowed with concerns about toxicity (direct and indirect). Therefore, novel treatment options are needed, to treat a large variety of protozoan-caused infections. We have prepared a purine nucleoside platform in the Laboratory for Medicinal Chemistry (Ghent University), based on known and novel sugar- and purine ring scaffolds. We have demonstrated their ability to act as antiprotozoal agents (primarily against trypanosomes, but also other).
Dive into the research portal and discover all opportunities.