Bharath Villuri, Ph.D., has been accepted into the Mid-Atlantic I-Corps Hub & Morgan State I-Corps Customer Discovery Workshop, which is focused on translating academic research into commercialization opportunities and is part of a National Science Foundation program.

Dr. Villuri serves as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Umesh Desai, Ph.D., chair and professor in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry and faculty member in VCU's Center for Drug Discovery. Dr. Villuri's accepted project focuses on Early-Stage Sulfate-Protected Building Blocks and Tools to Enable Scalable Synthesis of Sulfated Glycans.

"As part of this I-Corps cohort, I am learning how to translate early-stage academic research into potential real-world applications through customer discovery, market validation and commercialization strategies," Dr. Villuri shared. "In particular, I am exploring how the masked sulfation and sulfate-protected building block framework could help address key bottlenecks in accessing structurally defined sulfated molecules, which are often difficult to synthesize and scale. By enabling more practical and scalable routes to these molecules, the framework has the potential to help researchers move sulfated glycan-based discoveries closer to translational and therapeutic development."

Congratulations, Dr. Villuri, for being accepted into this prestigious program!