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Impact

Download the Eshelman Institute for Innovation 2022 Annual Impact Report

The Eshelman Institute for Innovation was established in 2014 with a $100 million commitment from Dr. Fred Eshelman. The Institute provides grant funding to UNC faculty who are collaborating with scientists, health care providers and educators both inside and outside UNC-Chapel Hill, including academia, industry and foundations.

Since our creation in 2014, the Institute has provided over $33MM in funding to over 170 faculty, staff, postdoctoral fellow, and student projects. As a result of these grants, our funded projects have raised $171MM+ in follow-on grants or startup funds.

The Institute was created with the frame of launching innovation moonshots, and in 2022, the Institute continued to make significant progress in Therapeutics and the First In Venture Studio.

  • In 2022, READDI (Rapidly Emerging Antiviral Drug Development Initiative) hired a new CEO, Jimmy Rosen, and formulated a new Board with excellent independent board members. READDI, Inc. now has a formal agreement with UNC and has an exciting year ahead. To date, we have raised $106MM for this effort from various sources.
  • The rest of our therapeutic work continues to advance. We began to fund our oncology portfolio with the Lineberger Cancer Center and hope to formalize this relationship in 2023. We also received funding from opioid settlement funds which were received by the state to begin work on a novel pain portfolio.
  • First-In Venture Studio, continued to progress in 2022. We ran two more sprints and will launch at least two more startups in 2023. We believe there is an opportunity to launch the studio across the state and have a broad economic impact. This partnership with UNC Health, High Alpha Innovation, and Amazon AWS is extremely exciting, and we hope that the statehouse might be interested in supporting the work. We also launched a parallel studio effort with a second studio provider that we call PowerUp for the campuses of HBCUs. This work will begin at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NC A&T) in 2023.

The above is just a small glimpse into what we accomplished in 2022, and we encourage you to review our full report that details the tremendous success we had last year.

Download our 2022 Impact Report