Breakout Labs Makes First Early-Stage Science Company Grants

Breakout Labs, a revolving investment fund in San Francisco that aims to support early-stage enterprises developing radical new technologies, announced its first six grants yesterday. The fund is backed by the Thiel Foundation, established by entrepreneur Peter Thiel, a founder of online payments service PayPal and an early investor in Facebook.

All of the recipient companies are early start-ups and developing platform technologies that can have a broad impact, but may lack an immediate commercial payback. The companies receiving Breakout Labs grants, each of $350,000, include:

– 3Scan, in San Francisco, developing a process of 3-D digital imaging of brain tissue, using knife edge scanning microscope technology researched at Texas A&M University that promises to be faster and less expensive than current methods.

– Arigos Biomedical, in Mountain View, California, that Breakout Labs says is developing ways of cooling organs for long-term storage, which in combination with other advances in tissue engineering and stem cell therapies, could lead to making banked organs available to patients needing a transplant.

– Immusoft, in Seattle, a biotechnology company developing a process for programming a patient’s immune cells to produce broadly neutralizing antibodies, developed in labs at California Institute of Technology.

– Inspirotec, in Chicago, devising a simple and inexpensive technology for monitoring air samples in public spaces for pandemics and epidemics, airports and stadiums for bioterrorism agents, and homes for allergens.

– Longevity Biotech, in Philadelphia, that Breakout Labs says is creating a new class of artificial protein therapies called hybridtides, targeted biologic-like molecules that are resistant to breakdown by natural digestive enzymes.

– Positron Dynamics, in Mountain View, California, developing the first mobile positron scanner for non-destructive detection of defects. A positron is the antimatter counterpart of an electron, and has the same mass as an electron but an opposite charge and magnetic moment.

Breakout Labs uses a revolving fund model, where recipients may retain full intellectual property (IP) rights to their technologies, but assign a royalty stream or opt for a small investment in their companies. Another option for funded companies is to assign IP rights to Breakout Labs in exchange for a substantial royalty stream from future revenues.

Read more: Fund to Back Independent, Early Stage Science Companies

Photo: Andrew Magill/Flickr

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