TAIPEI, Taiwan - The 2019 R&D 100 Awards held its award gala in San Mateo, CA on December 5th to recognize the top 100 innovations of the past year. The Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), a two-award winner, attended the event to accept the honors. Its RAIBA – Reconfigurable and Regulatable Battery Array System was recognized in the IT/Electrical category, and the bionic knobby magnetic beads manufacturing technology iKNOBEADS in Other. Once again, the Institute successfully demonstrated its innovation capacity on the global stage.
Paul J. Heney, Vice President, and Editorial Director for R&D World commented that when entering the R&D 100 Awards, it is important to show not only your product and service that is innovative, but how it has improved upon other competitive technologies, how it is changing the game.
“This is the 12th year that ITRI has won R&D 100 Awards. Both of ITRI’s winning technologies this year present actual solutions to address global challenges. While RAIBA incorporates circular economy into energy technology to optimize the performance of battery modules for electric vehicles or energy storage systems, iKNOBEADS makes a significant breakthrough in T cell immunotherapy by activating T cells to fight cancer more effectively,” said ITRI President Edwin Liu.
RAIBA is designed to solve the heterogeneity issue and integrate used batteries in renewable energy storage systems. Its reconfigurable and regulatable battery architecture allows weaker batteries to ‘step aside’ from time to time so that they will not halt or interfere with the system. It also enables stronger batteries to shoulder more load and therefore all batteries die out simultaneously. This flexibility grants a battery array the programmatic control capabilities that can be used to squeeze out all the electrical energy, reduce the total charging time, and cut down the loss and cost of DC to AC conversion.
iKNOBEADS, the manufacturing technology for the world's only biomimetic knobby magnetic beads, perfectly suits the ex vivo activation and expansion of human T cells. In contrast with commercially available magnetic beads that are all spherical, iKNOBEADS are irregularly protruded like spiky balls, creating a larger surface area and potentially improving interactions with human T cells. Moreover, iKNOBEADS show higher activation and expansion efficiency for both αβT and γδT cells whereas other magnetic beads on the market target only αβT cells. iKNOBEADS offer a more efficient and economical solution to generate T cells for immunotherapy.
Since 2008, ITRI has received 41 R&D 100 Awards for its outstanding contributions toward innovating a better future for society and pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Many of ITRI’s winning technologies have been licensed and commercialized through industry partners. Other R&D 100 Awards recipients this year include the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, NASA, and Argonne National Laboratory.
