Duke-Coulter Translational Partnership

Supports early-stage translational research at Duke through seed pilots and commercialization pathways for faculty investigators.

The Duke-Coulter Translational Partnership is an endowed translational biomedical engineering program at Duke University. It was seeded by a $20 million Wallace H. Coulter Foundation endowment and now runs as a self-sustaining Duke BME program that distributes about $700,000 a year in direct-cost grants to Duke faculty teams.

The partnership backs projects that address an unmet clinical need and aim toward a commercial product or a measurable clinical improvement. Applicants need at least two co-PIs, one from Duke BME and one from the Duke School of Medicine with access to patients or patient samples, and the tracked grant cap is $330,000.

This is an internal Duke route, not an open external funder, so the practical test is whether a team can bridge engineering, medicine, and translation in one proposal. The strongest fit is a project with clear clinical pull, a believable path to commercialization, and faculty already positioned to work across the two schools.