Princeton faculty developing technologies to treat and cure diseases and to improve power plant production and website security have received awards from the University’s Intellectual Property Accelerator Fund.

The IP Accelerator program gives researchers up to $100,000 each to conduct studies to demonstrate that their discoveries can meet a societal need. This support can help advance technologies to the point where they can attract investment from and licensing by a startup or existing company, enabling them to make a meaningful real-world impact.

“Princeton researchers continue to solve societal challenges across many sectors including health and medicine, energy and the environment, agriculture and many others,” said John Ritter, executive director of Princeton’s Office of Technology Licensing and New Ventures. “Through these grants, Princeton University helps to advance these curiosity-based research discoveries into developments that will form the foundation of tomorrow’s life-changing technologies and services.”

The IP Accelerator Fund is one of several seed funding programs administered by the Office of the Dean for Research. The four projects awarded IP Accelerator grants in 2025 are:

Towards a therapeutic treatment for Huntington’s Disease

Britt Adamson, assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics

Huntington’s Disease (HD) is a slowly progressing, incurable neurodegenerative disease that leads to motor, behavioral, and cognitive impairment. The genetic cause of HD is an expanded region of repetitive DNA in the gene huntingtin, which can be inherited. Most people that inherit such an allele, however, develop symptoms of HD only after decades.

In her proposal, Adamson explained that, during the long latency period preceding HD symptoms, the repetitive region in huntingtin is thought to further expand in brain cells, and that inhibiting this additional expansion represents a promising treatment for HD.  Her lab has developed a set of biosensors to detect the activity of genes responsible for expansion and discovered a cluster of novel compounds that inhibit the function of those genes.

The IP Accelerator funds will drive further study of the compounds, which have potential to become candidates for HD therapies.

Integrating thermal energy storage at a combined cycle power plant

Chris Greig, the Theodora D. '78 & William H. Walton III '74 Senior Research Scientist, Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment (ACEE), and lecturer in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and ACEE.

Combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power plants, which contribute roughly one-third of U.S. power generation, use gas and steam turbines to generate electricity. With growing electricity demands from artificial intelligence driving new investment in CGTs across the country, improving the flexibility and efficiency of such plants is critical to lowering costs and emissions.

Greig and ACEE colleague Aniruddh Mohan propose using a patent-pending all-in-one thermal energy storage and steam generator system that Mohan and others developed to integrate excess renewable energy on the grid with combined cycle power plants. One configuration would significantly reduce “duct burning” at combined cycle plants, a highly fuel- and emissions-intensive method of driving greater power production. 

In his IP Accelerator proposal, Greig noted a market opportunity for the new system, which improves a CCGT plant’s flexibility, lowers operating costs, and reduces emissions. Greig and Mohan have formed a startup company, Silo Thermal Energy, that has benefitted from a Princeton Faculty New Venture Assistance Fund and insights from the National Science Foundation I-Corps program.

A holistic monitoring platform for web services

Prateek Mittal, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

State-of-the-art monitoring platforms fail to detect malicious attacks, such as in 2022 when attackers stole about $2 million worth of cryptocurrency from users of the Korean crypto exchange KLAYswap. The hackers exploited vulnerabilities in the Internet’s routing ecosystem and web authentication certificates.

Mittal proposes building a novel network monitoring framework, from Crosslayer Labs, to detect and mitigate malicious attacks. In his IP Accelerator proposal, he noted that of all the network and security monitoring options available, “none address the fundamental threat of monitoring all networked dependencies invoked by external software and cloud-based hosting.”

Crosslayer is a network service monitoring tool that identifies potential attacks on a website and all its dependencies and connections. The system can alert network operators with immediately actionable information and even trigger automatic mitigation maneuvers.

The IP Accelerator funds will be used in several ways, including testing against a range of potential network attacks, fine-tuning the system’s ability to identify false positives and false negatives, and working to assure system reliability and scaling use of the tool.

Optimization and characterization of drugs for curing chronic Hepatitis B virus infection

Alexander Ploss, the Harry C. Wiess Professor of Life Sciences and Molecular Biology, acting co-director, Global Health and Health Policy

Hepatitis B (HBV) is a serious medical problem, silently attacking the liver and claiming more than a million lives each year, most through decompensated cirrhosis and liver cancer. According to the World Health Organization, 254 million people were living with chronic HBV infection in 2022 alone.

At the heart of this pathogen is a unique molecular feature: the virus ability to generate covalently closed circular DNA (cccDNA), a form of the viral genome that evades treatment and ensures chronic infection.

Ploss’ mission is to develop a first-in-class functional cure for HBV by discovering and designing drugs for blocking the conversion of incoming relaxed circular DNA (rcDNA) into cccDNA.

The IP Accelerator funds will support further research. To drive the translational potential of this work, Ploss has launched a company —Acurasset Inc.— focused on bringing breakthrough HBV prevention strategies to the clinic.