Basilard BioTech has provided an initial $7,500 gift to support the research of Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering Masa Rao at the Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering at University of California, Riverside. Basilard is actively commercializing a disruptive nanomechanical gene delivery technology platform (which the company has branded as SoloPore) originally pioneered in Rao’s lab with funding from the National Institutes of Health and UC Riverside. 

“Our success to date in commercializing technology originally developed at UC Riverside is a testament to the tremendous potential that can be realized when entrepreneurs and academics work effectively together to bring promising research out of the lab and into the marketplace to achieve real-world impact,” said Basilard CEO Brynley Lee. “We are happy to be able to give back to the university when feasible to help support continued innovation in Professor Rao’s lab.”

“We are thankful for Basilard’s generous support, since funds such as these give us greater flexibility to pursue exciting new research directions,” said Rao. “We can go a little further out on the limb and test ideas that we wouldn’t have the resources to consider otherwise.” 

Basilard BioTech is the first biotech instrumentation company to launch commercially from UC Riverside’s EPIC entrepreneurship incubator. Basilard was founded by Rao and Lee in July of 2019, and in early 2020 secured a $500,000 Pre-Seed investment from UC Riverside’s Highlander Venture Fund, which is managed by Vertical Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. The company continues to work with its investor partners to help fund ongoing development of their next generation technology prototypes and further engagement with leading cell therapy companies who desire to use the disruptive technology.