NCKU Teams Shine at Innovation & Startups Final Competition

TAINAN, Taiwan

A total of four teams from National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), southern Taiwan, won big at the competition of Innovation & Startups program initiated by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), the university revealed recently.

The four teams took home the Potential Startup Awards and were awarded a prize of NT$ 600,000 dollars, respectively.

In addition, the biggest prize, Outstanding Startup Award which comes with a NT$ 2,000,000 dollars grant, goes to three of the four NCKU teams.

The Innovation & Startups, a competitive grand program initiated by MOST has awarded NT$ 2,000,000 dollars in startup funding to each of the first five outstanding startup teams to help them move their research results toward commercialization.

There are 233 teams participating the competition from February, only ten teams were selected to receive the prize.

Cherub is one of the teams won the biggest prize for NCKU. “Cherub is designed to apply high frequency electromagnetic thermotherapy to treat big tumors in animal, and our method has great potential for future clinical applications,” said Sheng-Chieh Huang, one of the designers in Cherub and he has involved in the research and design for more than five years.

He said, “Electromagnetic thermotherapy has been extensively investigated recently and may become a new surgical modal for a variety of medical applications.”

“It applies a high-frequency alternating magnetic field to heat up magnetic materials inserted within the human body to generate tissue coagulation or cell apoptosis,” Huang added.

The team used a new procedure with dual-row needle arrays under an electromagnetic thermotherapy system with a feedback temperature control system.

The research result shows bloodless liver resection, which is challenging using existing methods, according to Huang.

Huang also indicated that “The Phase I clinical trials was finished this June and processed to Phase II this July.”

The electromagnetic thermotherapy was also performed in the pet animals and currently Cherub is aiming for pet medicine market, according to Huang.