Engineering Students Sweep
Business Plan Competition
June 5, 2009
By Daniel Kane
The core technologies behind the top three finishers in a UC San Diego student-run business plan competition were developed by graduate students at the Jacobs School of Engineering.
Team Biological Dynamics, founded by bioengineering graduate students, finished first in the UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge. The winning business plan focused on their new early cancer diagnostic technology. Biomedical engineers involved in Tritonics took second place. They are applying advanced biomedical engineering to eliminate clogging in medical catheters. Third place went to RADIOFAST, a venture launched by electrical engineering graduate students whose technology enables “superman vision” in mobile devices.
The first place team, Biological Dynamics, has formed a startup company, with the same name. The $15,000 in legal services and $27,000 in cash Biological Dynamics took home will go to secure intellectual property for their company.
“We’ll use the winnings to pay patent fees, attorney fees and licensing fees. This money will help us get completely in the black. It’s beautiful,” said Raj Krishnan, the Jacobs School bioengineering graduate student leader of Biological Dynamics, which is currently seeking venture capital.
“Once you secure the intellectual property, VCs look at you a lot more seriously. The money is going to be instrumental in helping us get investors,” said Krishnan.
The technology behind the winning business plan offers a better way to identify and separate secondary cancer biomarkers directly from blood, such as cell-free circulating high molecular weight DNA. For this research, Krishnan won the top prize at the 2009 Jacobs School Research Expo. Read more about the technology and Krishnan’s winning streak here.
Along with Krishnan, the team includes two fellow bioengineering Ph.D. students from UC San Diego—David Charlot and Roy Lefkowitz. Maya Agarwal, an MBA student from the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego, is also on the team.
Krishnan said the team could not have come so far without guidance from Steve Flaim and Hal DeLong from UC San Diego’s von Liebig Center for Entrepreneurism and Technology Advancement.
“Early on, Stephen Flaim and Hal DeLong from von Liebig showed us how to pitch our company to business people. Initially, we were way too heavy on the data,” said Krishnan. “The von Liebig Center also connected us with many potential investors.”
The second place team, Tritonics, is a San Diego based medical device company focused on applying advanced biomedical engineering to eliminate clogging in medical catheters. Starting with an application for hydrocephalus, Tritonics aims to apply this technology to chronic pain pumps, cancer chemotherapy delivery, and diabetic insulin infusion.
Tritonics’ core technology was developed by a multidisciplinary team including biomedical engineering graduate students from the Jacobs School of Engineering—Saleh Amirrazi, Kathryn Olson, Veronica Neiman, Jun Shin, and Jayant Menon. Dr. Menon is also a clinically active neurosurgeon at the UC San Diego Medical Center. Team member Kabir Gambhir is an MBA student at the UC San Diego Rady School of Management with 10 years of experience in the biomedical device industry.
Tritonics’ advisors include Juan Lasheras, a mechanical and aerospace engineering (MAE) professor at the Jacobs School and co-founder of INNERCOOL Inc.; and Serrah Namini, former FDA inspector and CEO of IsoMillennium.
“Guidance from the Von Liebig center and CONNECT were invaluable to our success,” said Amirriazi.
The team will use their $20,000 in winnings from the UCSD Entrepreneurship Challenge to enrich its device and further protect its intellectual property.
“The funds have created a foundation upon which our cross-campus team can develop the medical devices of tomorrow,” Amirriazi said. “I believe that we are extremely fortunate to be a part of entrepreneurial San Diego community. We will use these great resources, in addition to our multidisciplinary skills, to move Tritonics forward.”
“Tritonics is a great cross campus success that pulled together members of the school of engineering, the school of business, and surgeons from UCSD to create a team truly capable of solving serious healthcare problems,” Menon, the neurosurgeon, wrote in an email message to the Jacobs School. This was the first time in the competition’s short history that the UC San Diego Medical Center and Department of Surgery were represented.
Third Place went to RADIOFAST, which includes Mehmet Parlak, a Jacobs School electrical engineering graduate student. RADIOFAST took home $10,000 in legal services and $9,500 in cash, which the team plans to use to secure more intellectual property.
Earlier this year, RADIOFAST won the UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge’s Winter Executive Summary Competition. Based on the technology and patent-pending semiconductor intellectual property recently developed at the Jacobs School of Engineering, RADIOFAST integrates proprietary terahertz-band silicon microchips into wireless high performance, low cost imaging sensors for next generation healthcare diagnostics and security applications.
Parlak and the rest of the RADIOFAST team worked extensively with the von Liebig Center’s executive director Rosibel Ochoa, as well as von Liebig advisor Tim Rueth. In addition, Parlak took all four of the von Liebig graduate Entrepreneurial courses and obtained the von Liebig/UCSD Extension Certificate in Technology Business Creation.
Michael Alston, also a RADIOFAST team member, earned his electrical engineering Ph.D. from the Jacobs School in 1993 and is now a second year MBA student at the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego.
Xconomy and San Diego Metropolitan Magazine both wrote stories this week about the business plan competition.
UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge
The mission of the UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge is to foster community involvement and technological innovation by bringing multi-disciplinary teams of engineers, scientists, and business-minded students together with local area entrepreneurs and professionals.
According to this student-run organization, there are four primary goals of the competition:
Developing networks of people with technical, financial, marketing, and management backgrounds with the common interest in creating new enterprises
Fostering the generation of marketable ideas and their development into value generating enterprises
Encouraging awareness of cutting edge technology in the business community and awareness of business realities in the technological/scientific community
Ultimately securing the future health of San Diego’s economy by promoting development of new industries and enterprises
Media Contact: Daniel Kane, 858-534-3262 or dbkane@ucsd.edu
