The ninth-annual $100K Business Plan Competition last Wednesday selected winners from a pool of 13 finalists, the largest in the competition's recent history.
Sponsored by the Gordon Institute's Entrepreneurial Leadership Program (ELS), the competition awarded first place prizes to Cinzia Metallo, a fifth-year graduate student in the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences, and Eileen Guo (LA '11) in the Classical Business Plan Competition and the Social Entrepreneurship Competition, respectively.
Metallo received $12,500 for her winning project, Myoelectra, which generated new electromyographic electrodes for the biofeedback rehabilitation of facial and throat muscles in Parkinson's disease.
Inge Milde, director of the competition, told the Daily in an email that Metallo's project developed customizable electrodes as opposed to standard-sized electrodes that target specific facial muscles.
"Because of the intrinsic characteristics of the technology, it is more flexible, while conventional electrodes are rather stiff," Metallo said.
Guo and her team's winning project, EDx presents ETB, developed a new Multi-
Drug Resistance Tuberculosis (MDR-TB) diagnostic, which allows existing diagnostic tests to provide faster results, according to Milde. Guo's team included Johns Hopkins University students Anmol Chopra, Hiren Mistry and Anjana Sinha. Guo and her team also received $12,500.
"We started this program at Johns Hopkins and realized that we might be able to actually do something about MDR-TB," Guo said. "People would talk about the issue of diagnosis, so that's what we decided to work on."
Guo also worked with Jose-Maria Fernandez, a longtime researcher of tuberculosis and its diagnosis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"We communicated with her about the idea, and she completely agreed that this was a good way to diagnose patients, addressing the six-month gap problem," Chopra said. "She advised us in terms of things that she had tried and helped us with our diagnostic capabilities."
Tuberculosis affects 9 million people globally every year, with 1 million deaths annually, according to Mistry.
"Our technology diagnoses patients at the first sight so that they can be shifted to the appropriate antibiotics on day one," he said. "MDR-TB is an infectious disease, so if it spreads to the community, it can be a big burden to the community and it affects GDP a lot."
MDR-TB can also lead to extreme drug resistance, making the team's technology critical, Mistry said.
Both Metallo and Guo's teams intend to use the money to finance the next stages of their businesses.
"I'm going to use the money to incorporate the company and finance the first steps, especially more fundraising, since obviously 12K is not enough," Metallo said. "But I think what this competition did, more than the money, was that it validates your idea and your business plan so you can actually approach an investor with something more than just a business plan."
Members of the EDx presents ETB project will continue to develop the product plan after the competition.
"We're now more motivated after this competition," Mistry said. "The other members will certainly help with developing the plan and using the resources we have available to get to users in the developing world."
Second place for the Classical Business Plan Competition went to senior Becket Linn, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill student Willis Kennedy, Florida Atlantic University student Steven Wright and University of California, Los Angeles alumnus Vincent Tam for their project TeemPlay, a game that crowdsources game development by creating an environment for people to simultaneously play and create video games in 3-D.
Senior Brandon Cohn and Georgetown University student David Conway took third place in the Classical Competition for MyPsych, an application and website that streamlines patient-therapist communication.
Second and third runner-ups for the Social Entrepreneurship Competition included freshman Sharad Sagar with his project Dexterity Global, a mentoring and resource business for entrepreneurs, and seniors Brett Andler, Joo Kang, Tyler Wilson and Samuel Woolf for Uji, a shower head that helps users save money, water and energy.
Guo expressed excitement about her team's win given the high-quality pool of finalists.
"This is firstly a great validation of what we are doing, since people actually believe in us and care about what we're doing," Guo said.
