UNC Chapel Hill — OTC / UNC-NCSU BME / Eshelman School of Pharmacy
Funds UNC-Chapel Hill internal commercialization arms, including proof-of-concept and startup support for university inventors.
This catalog entry conflates three distinct UNC-Chapel Hill internal units: (1) the Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC) within Innovate Carolina, which provides proof-of-concept grants, KickStart awards up to $50K for IP-based faculty-led startups, and the 1789 Student Venture Fund (two rounds per year); (2) the UNC/NCSU Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering (Lampe BME), which administers small internal undergraduate and graduate recognition awards — the BME funding-opportunities subpage returned 404 as of 2026-05-27; and (3) the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy / Eshelman Institute for Innovation, funded by a $100M founding gift from Fred Eshelman in 2014, which has deployed >$30M via a Therapeutics Accelerator (Innovation Curation Program RFPs, Rankin Innovator Awards for junior faculty and students) and the Kairos Venture Studio (~$1M pre-seed per launched digital health startup via external investment committee). All programs are restricted to UNC-Chapel Hill faculty, students, or postdocs — none are open to external applicants.