UA Little Rock Announces $750K Grant During Boozman Visit

John Boozman

The Univeristy of Arkansas at Little Rock announced during Sen. John Boozman’s recent campus visit that it has received a $750,000 U.S. Department of Defense grant for its NuCress scaffold, a bone regeneration technology. 

The NuCress scaffold is an implantable device that promotes controlled, robust bone regeneration in fractures, gaps where bone is missing and major injury defects, including previously untreatable catastrophic injuries.

The grant, provided by the department’s Peer Reviewed Orthopaedic Research Program, will be used to investigate the scaffold’s ability to combat infection while regenerating bone. 

Earlier this fall, UA Little Rock received a $5.6 million grant from the DOD to fund the pre-market development of the same technology. 

Boozman, R-Arkansas, supported both grants during the application stages. 

“The commitment by DOD to continue advancing bone regeneration technology demonstrates the importance of this research and the opportunities it presents for our wounded warriors,” Boozman said in a news release. “I’m proud to support this award so we can discover breakthroughs, spark innovation, and achieve things we might have thought were impossible. This and other important research being conducted at UA Little Rock is essential to moving us forward and gives Arkansas something to be very proud of.”

The bone regeneration research is led by UA Little Rock (principal investigator is Alexandru Biris), the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (principal investigator is Mark Smeltzer) and the University of Tennessee in Knoxville (principal investigator is David Anderson).

The technology also recently received a TechConnect Defense Innovation award for the second consecutive year at the annual Defense TechConnect Summit and Expo. The award was presented to NuShores Biosciences LLC, the licensee of the NuCress scaffold.

NuShores CEO Sharon Ballard said in the release, “This year’s conference validated the marketplace need for our initial orthopedic product and for applying our NuCress technologies to new medical indications.”