The office of US Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire today announced the selection by the US Department of Energy of the recipients of its Phase 1 SBIR awards for 2011. Both of Xemed’s applications were selected for funding.
Xemed’s primary focus is to commercialize magnetized gas as an inhaled magnetic resonance imaging agent for diagnosing and managing respiratory diseases such as COPD and asthma. However, achieving FDA approval for a diagnostic agent can require years of effort. These two new SBIR projects will allow Xemed to demonstrate feasibility for using its magnetized gas technology in conjunction with subatomic particle beam accelerators for fundamental physics measurements at government laboratories in the US and abroad. One project would use high pressure magnetized helium-3 together with an electron beam to improve studies of nuclear forces by a factor approaching one hundred. The second would enable a large thin wall of magnetized helium-3 to analyze neutron scattering reactions. Since these experiments each require months of effort of a billion dollar laboratory, improving their efficiency by a large factor by exploiting Xemed’s technology could save costs, increase productivity, or enable experiments to be accomplished that were previously unimaginable.
