By Hannah Grover, NM Political Report
Sandia National Laboratories entered into more agreements this year with businesses to help bring its technologies to market than it has since the 1990s when the world wide web was in the beginning stages of becoming more commonplace.
These agreements are known as Cooperative Research and Development Agreements, or CRADAs. During the federal fiscal year 2024, which ended Sept. 30, Sandia entered into 72. This is the second highest number of CRADAs the lab has ever entered into.
Jason Martinez, a business development specialist at Sandia, said there isn’t any particular area where the labs have seen a spike in CRADAs.
“It’s just kind of more like the rising tide has raised all the boats,” he said.
Martinez said there are a variety of factors contributing to the increase, including more awareness surrounding recent success stories and more funding opportunities from federal agencies such as the Department of Energy. He also said the COVID-19 pandemic led to a proliferation of new businesses starting up.
“CRADA is an opportunity to get intellectual property, knowledge, capabilities and the human capital that the laboratories have developed and fostered over the years and transfer that out into academia and industry for the benefit of the US economy,” he said.
Martinez said the labs are not able to commercialize the technologies they develop and instead need industry partners to do so.
This can be demonstrated by the CRADA that Sandia entered into with Adaptyx Biosciences this year to advance the microneedle technology that researchers such as analytical chemist Ronen Polsky have been working on for more than a decade.
“So microneedles are just as they sound, really small needles,” Polsky said. “They pierce through the outermost layer of the skin, and they’re so short that they don’t eat nerve endings, so they’re completely painless. And because they’re also so short, we don’t measure blood, we measure something called interstitial fluid. And we’ve been designing these as a way to minimally invasively self-administer a diagnostic patch that can detect circulating biomarkers.”
He said they are similar to a wearable glucose monitor, but are smaller, less painful and target a wider range of markers.
Polsky said almost everything found in blood can also be measured in interstitial fluid.
“You can use the interstitial fluid as a blood proxy, but we also believe that there is likely unique information in the interstitial fluid that you won’t find in blood,” he said.
He gave the example of immune cell content from the skin.
“Maybe [microneedle technology] will be a better way to detect infectious diseases, for instance,” he said.
Adaptyx Biosciences was an ideal partner for this effort because the company was already interested in researching interstitial fluid.
In a news release earlier this year, Alex Yoshikawa, the co-founder of Adaptyx, said the company wants to “broadly understand the components in interstitial fluid and how those components correlate to blood measurements.”
CRADAs like the one between Sandia and Adaptyx also benefit the economy.
Two studies that Sandia and the National Nuclear Securities Administration commissioned indicated that, between 2000 and 2023, the labs have generated $140 billion for the economy through developing technologies and entering into CRADAs and patent license agreements.
The results of those studies were released in April.
Martinez said the CRADAs are a collaborative effort that benefits both the labs and the businesses or academic institutions that enter into the partnerships.
“It’s kind of a two way street, because we have our own missions that we have at the laboratories, and industry and academia have their perspectives on how to solve a lot of good science and engineering questions out there,” he said. “So they’re able to bring to bear the perspectives from a commercial aspect and from an academic aspect on some of the problems we have as well. So we view it as a mutual collaboration. It’s a collaboration and the truest sense of the word.”