Taxor Diagnostics
Tulane University Invention #10
Brian Yu
[email protected]

We are a team of enthusiastic medical students and researchers ready to leverage our medical, business, and biomedical research expertise in order to develop cancer diagnostics that will enable for more personalized treatment decisions.

Taxotest, our flagship product, is a diagnostic biomarker that can be applied to a patient’s tumor sample to predict whether she would benefit from taxane-based chemotherapy. By making this prediction, oncologists can spare patients from non-working chemotherapy regimens, save valuable treatment time and prevent uncomfortable side effects. We project that this product will lead to $365 million in annual savings from reductions in inefficient chemotherapy usage in the US.

We hail from the Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans, Louisiana, as part of a burgeoning biotechnology community led by the New Orleans Bioinnovation Center. Since entering the start-up phase of the competition, we have reached out to the National Cancer Institute, reviewed our research plans with the technology’s inventor, identified interested investors, and pursued additional technologies that fit our mission of bringing greater personalization to cancer treatments.

We are prepared to tackle the numerous challenges ahead. In the end, if we can bring better results and better quality of life to cancer patients by minimizing the uncertainties in their care, then we will consider our efforts to be vindicated.

Team Biographies

Brian Yu holds a BS in Economics with a minor in Philosophy from Tulane University. He is a medical student at the Tulane School of Medicine. Prior to medical school, he attended Boston University for his masters degree in medical sciences, where he developed an interest in biotechnology through coursework in translational research and technology commercialization. Brian has clinical research experience in psychiatry. His experiences with study design and biostatistics are valuable for the challenge of clinically validating our technology.

Richard Tang holds a BS in Biochemistry with a minor in Economics from Tulane University. He is a medical student at the Tulane School of Medicine. Before he matriculated into medical school, Richard worked for a year as the Fund Development Intern for a community development nonprofit, where he took charge of grant writing and board development initiatives, among other tasks. Richard has had significant laboratory research experience; he has previously worked on developing a nanoparticle-mediated chemotherapeutic, and is currently conducting research on IGF-1 signalling in atherosclerosis.

Muralidharan (“Murali”) Anbalagan holds both an MS and PhD in Environmental Toxicology from the University of Madras, India. He is a senior postdoctoral researcher at the Tulane Medical School Department of Structural and Cellular Biology. His research focuses on developing innovative oncology therapeutics for endocrine related cancers, and breast cancer in particular. Murali has been extensively published in peer-reviewed journals, and has also served as an invited reviewer for several others.

Mesopharm Therapeutics
Stanford University Invention #4
Ka Yam Chak
[email protected]

Entering the Start-up phase of the Breast Cancer Startup Challenge (http://breastcancerstartupchallenge.com), Mesopharm Therapeutics officially launches on April 7th, 2014.  Our goal is to revolutionize cancer therapies by combining state of the art therapeutics and theranostics.  Our talented team brings together people with diverse expertise and backgrounds from Stanford University (USA), University of Auckland (New Zealand), and University Medical Center Utrecht (Netherlands), reflecting the power of multidisciplinary and global collaboration.

OUR MISSION:

Breast Cancer is the most common cause of death in women (521 000 deaths in 2012), affecting 6.3 million people worldwide. WHO recently reported that breast cancer incidence has increased by more than 20%, while mortality has increased by 14% (Source:WHO) and called for immediate attention to address this sharp increase.

At Mesopharm, we envision to develop first-in-class biological therapies at a pre-clinical stage and accelerate their transition into the clinic. Our flagship drug candidates target specific transmembrane protein that is highly expressed in breast cancer and other tumors.  We plan to extend our therapies beyond breast cancer to other devastating cancers where our drug candidates show indication for therapeutic use. 

KEY ACTIVITIES:

• Mesopharm launches on April 7th, 2014!!!!
  
• At the full gear on drafting business plan for submitting licensing application on April 15th, 2014.  
  
• Initiated engagement with the National Cancer Institute and Dr. Mitchell Ho (the inventor of the technology) to develop a CRADA (Collaborative Research and Development Agreement).  
  
• Have successfully secured full support of chemistry expertise on therapeutic drug development from the Auckland Cancer Society Research Centre.   
  
• Arranged a series of meetings to seed funders and seasoned entrepreneurs.  
  

Our Team

BESPOKE Therapeutics
Wake Forest University Invention #7
Gonzo Estupinan
[email protected]

Hello! We are BESPOKE Therapeutics. What started as a business plan competition sponsored by NIH, Avon Foundation, and The Center for Advancing Innovation, has developed into a new and unique Biotech. Our mission is to improve the quality of life for people with cancer by advancing scientific research that keeps the patient in mind. Our goal is to change the way people treat cancer, and give hope to those who need it the most.

April is an exciting month for BESPOKE. Through conversations with key stakeholders, we are planning our optimal path for moving forward towards achieving our mission. We are assembling an advisory board and gaining access to funding that will help further our goals. By enhancing our business plan, we are ensuring that we are meeting the patients' needs in every market and making our first steps impactful. Thank you for joining us as we set off on this journey. 

We are BESPOKE Therapeutics

Advancing research.  Advancing medicine. Advancing lives.

PS. Lookout for our new site launching soon - www.Bespokebiotech.com.

ProVivox Inc.
McGill/GCRG Invention #9
Dmitri Kharitidi
[email protected]

The ProVivoX Inc. team

Our multidisciplinary team emerged thanks to the Avon Foundation Breast Cancer Startup Challenge. Before our venture as entrepreneurs, our team members worked either at universities as researchers occupying leadership positions or as employees for various companies. This diverse blend constitutes our unique corporate DNA and allows us to better tackle upcoming challenges.

ProVivoX Inc. has officially been incorporated in March 2014, which is most evidently an important milestone for our company. Creating a new biotech startup company brings uncertainty, and, to be honest, most of us did not know what to expect. One relevant insight we came upon during our exploration is that no technology or product survives initial contact with the real world (or the customer). We use this knowledge in our approach to validate and improve our product, as many other Lean enthusiast entrepreneurs do. Given that we pride ourselves on being extremely dedicated and committed to our work, we seek the best quality standards in all of our interactions. To do so, during the process of implementing a successful business plan, we constantly sought feedback from our advisory board, composed of judges, professors, physicians, colleagues, and mentors – everybody is a resource for this purpose.

The key to a successful startup is an ability to grow and adapt within a rapidly changing environment; thus, efficient communication becomes essential for survival. Our team dynamics are reinforced by keeping the same pace week after week, and maintaining cohesiveness among all the members. Luckily, we represent a great cultural fit and we feel that we have been able to easily and rationally reach a consensus when needed.

Business development and strategy

One of the biggest challenges that we experienced was prioritizing all the difficult tasks that need to be accomplished. Indeed, the success of ProVivoX Inc. hinges on the choices we made and will make as co-founders. Through this process, we have discovered launching a startup is immensely interesting and entirely different from a more standard office job. Our new responsibilities include refining the business plan, implementing our intellectual property plan, and executing the activities that will lead us to our first concrete endeavors as a legal company (incorporation, negotiating and signing research agreements, establishing partnerships, etc). Secondly, the best card in our hand was the intrinsic potential of our innovation: we aim to bring to the market a cutting-edge product by merging a new technology and novel strategies to provide better information to patients afflicted with cancer. In the long run, we believe that our success will be derived from a balanced sum of talent and inspiration. To reach our goals and put to market a game-changing innovation, we need to be looking for a lot more than just talent – for us, this is called passion.

Time management is also crucial at this moment of the challenge: we know that every hour counts. As a small company we have limited resources, so each one of us has committed a given amount of time each day to drive the process forward efficiently. New priorities arise every day, and we have to stay focused and committed to the time allotted for the startup company. This is particularly important when looking for funding as we must clearly communicate all details of our company’s position, the importance of investing in the startup at this moment, and where we expect to be as the company continues to grow. In this process we have identified different sources of funding, including (but not limited to) grants, incubator organizations, non-profit entrepreneurship organizations, local development centers, and innovation centers. These opportunities will allow us to fulfill our first round of capital. As we hoped, our unique value proposition has sparked curiosity from different organizations and experts that identified the potential of our business model.

Social media and raising awareness


We communicate the value of our company by using different social media channels, a strategy now widely used by big and small corporations. Facebook has helped us make ProVivoX and our participation in the Breast Cancer Start-up Challenge visible to our networks and allows for easy communication of daily updates within our team. We have also set up a project and a company profile on LinkedIn, where ProVivoX Inc. cofounders have updated their job roles on their personal profiles and have created a following for ProVivoX Inc. in social media. Twitter is also an outlet where we notify our followers about our news and we can also follow organizations that we consider relevant, including other Breast Cancer Start-up Challenge finalists. Our presence on YouTube is also relevant because of the elevator pitch video that was previously uploaded onto the Challenge channel. These social media outlets will be used extensively in the development of our startup and will be featured prominently on our own webpage, www.provivox.com. The not-so-secret to success is to constantly look for ways to do things better, faster, and cheaper. We intend put this methodology to work for patients, to provide a fast and efficient prognosis test at a fraction of the cost.

In a nutshell, during the last months our unique, talented and motivated team at ProVivoX Inc. has excelled at achieving the required milestones to bring to life a startup company whose primary goal is to make a lasting impact on the quality of life of patients afflicted with cancer.

Team Blog Contact - Name
Hirak Biswas

Team Blog Contact's Email
[email protected]

TED Talk About Your Team
We are an enthusiastic team of students having life science, business and law expertise, dedicated to develop and translate novel cancer therapeutics from the bed to bedside

Tell us about your core team members 
Our core team consists of 5 students with expertise in cancer biology, cancer drug development, business and law. 

Hirak Biswas is a PhD students at Washington University in St. Louis. Hirak is conducting his doctoral thesis research in Dr. Greg Longmore's lab where he studies cell movement (metastasis) and the process of fibrosis in cancer and in heart disease. Hirak is part of the Cancer Biology Pathway at Washington University where he attends cancer clinic to understand the clinical aspects of treating cancer patients. He attended Johns Hopkins University for his masters degree in Biotechnology (High Throughput Screening and Drug Discovery). At Johns Hopkins University he conducted research on pancreatic cancer stem cells and cancer immunology which is the basis of the technology #2. Hirak takes a keen interest in technology commercialization and has previously won a business model competition and does scientific consulting for SCIMALS.

Anurag Agarwal is the in the lab of Dr. Helen Piwnica-Worms and his research focuses on cell cycle checkpoints in cancer. Anurag obtained his B.Tech degree in Biotechnology from Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). Anurag is the founder of SCIMALS, a company that provides scientific and market due diligence for early stage life science investments. Anurag has experience writing business plans for seed stage biotech companies to help them attract investment. Anurag has prior consulting experience with BALSA group and is an active member within the St. Louis Life Science Entrepreneur community.

Whitney Grither graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a B.A in Chemistry and Public Health. She is currently pursuing her MD/PhD degree from Washington University in St. Louis. She joined Dr. Greg Longmore's lab for her thesis work. Whitney is a expert chemist and uses her skills to develop targeted therapies for cancer metastasis and aspires to translate her discoveries to the clinic. Her experience with patients and chemical synthesis are valuable to understand the clinical challenges for our technology adoption and also chemical synthesis of CpG-ODN which is a critical component of our chosen technology.

Gurudatta Begur Nadiger is a an Executive MBA student at Kellogg School of Management. He is a business and Technology leader with extensive management experience and proven record of accomplishment in strategic planning, customer engagement, product development and implementation in start-up and corporate environment. He has outstanding skills in leadership, collaboration, global delivery,
problem solving, and managing cross functional teams. His ambition is improving global healthcare. He is the Practice Director of Client Services at MeKesson Health Solutions and is responsible for managing client service engagements for top tier health insurance companies and stakeholders of the engagement and collectively helps generate a revenue of $45M. He also mentors and supervises a team of managers, engineers, developers and testers in America and Asia. He also engages in Breast Cancer Awareness Program in rural India. 

Erik Nyre graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison with a BS in genetics. He is currently a MS/JD student at the University of Minnesota graduate and law schools. He also works as a Research Assistant at the Office of Technology Commercialization at University of Minnesota where he is in charge of assessing the commercial viability of new scientific inventions, reviewing patent literature for existing technologies, developing marketing materials for new technologies and identifying potential licensees. He has previously interned with the Missouri Biotechnology Association. Erik works in the laboratory of Dr. Timothy Starr, primarily investigating cancer gene discovery and therapy development. 

Please tell us about your advisors/mentors
Our science mentors and advisors are experts in the field of cancer immunology, breast cancer vaccine development and breast cancer vaccine clinical trials. They have the expertise and experience to help the core team develop the technology and carry it to clinical trials.

Our business advisors and mentors have extensive experience in life science and biotechnology start-ups. They are experienced in licensing technologies, raising seed funding, biotechnology regulatory affairs, clinical trials and exiting companies. All of them have science backgrounds (including immunology) and have experience leading large research teams. They are leaders in the biotechnology start-up revolution in the St. Louis Cortex Innovation Community and Business District. 

Why are your team members in the challenge
There is no dearth of innovating scientific discoveries being made in research labs there is a large opportunity to harvest the promising inventions. Our team members feel passionately about driving technology commercialization and this competition is an excellent platform for the same. Drawing from our collective previous experiences of drug discovery and immunology research, interacting with cancer patients, working with technology commercialization and healthcare technology implementation, we feel confident of our abilities as a team to take technology #2 from the clinic to the patients. We also found excellent mentors who could guide us through the entire process.

Team Blog Contact - Name
Frank Glaser

Team Blog Contact's Email
[email protected]

TED Talk About Your Team
Our team is truly a combination of all areas of expertise – from business, entrepreneurship, biomedical science, and medicine, we have junior and senior team members spanning a variety of specialties, including team members with experience in scientific product development from conception to monetization events including public offerings.

Tell us about your core team members 
Parastoo is currently a PhD student in biomedical engineering at Tulane who specializes in biomaterial synthesis and characterization, cell culture and animal models. She has multiple peer-reviewed publications, along with a number of oral and poster presentations in international conferences. In addition, she holds a US patent around which she formed Tympanogen; the company is developing a gel patch for the non-surgical repair of chronic perforations in the tympanic membrane. On her free time, Parastoo enjoys dancing (especially tango and traditional Persian dances), racquetball, tennis, poetry, reading, fashion, cooking and art.

After 3 years on Wall Street, Brian brings a solid financial and analytical foundation. In addition, he has been part of dozens of financing and capital markets transactions, as well as M&A transactions, both large and small – all of which required building a pitch from scratch. Outside of his current Tulane medical school requirements, he serves as VP of Strategy for a local healthcare IT startup which has raised ~$250,000 in the last year, and has commitments for additional financing in process. At this company, he worked with the CEO and co-founders to take their product from early R&D to end-customer roll-out. Finally, as a third year medical student, Brian has a basic underlying understanding of the disease processes that are intertwined with the patents up for use in the Challenge. Brian enjoys golf, tennis, and watching St. Louis Cardinals baseball.

Frank is currently pursuing an MD/MBA dual degree at the Tulane School of Medicine and Columbia Business School. Prior to this, he spent 3 years in healthcare strategy consulting. In this capacity, Frank advised pharmaceutical, biotech, and device companies on projects ranging from disease-level prioritizations to strategic L,M&A decisions. Frank has also conducted clinical research, resulting in the publication of six posters and articles in peer-reviewed publications. On his spare time, Frank takes on real estate investment and renovation projects, and enjoys Crossfit, racquet sports, and a range of outdoor activities.

Why are your team members in the challenge
Parastoo: I think this is a great opportunity for me to use my abilities towards the development of a novel treatment strategy. The public health implications of this project are enormous. This is also a fantastic learning experience as well, as I envision myself continuing to work on the innovation of biotechnology and medical devices throughout my career.

Brian: I see a unique opportunity to bring a multidisciplinary team to connect with established research to help move projects forward where the more traditional, unilateral approach has failed. There is a vast wasteland of concepts that could have (and should have) gone on to help patients, but didn’t – we have the opportunity to be a part of a patient solution with major impact. 

Frank: I am passionate about innovation. And during my time working with industry and beyond, I too discovered that there remains a large body of IP on the "back-burner" with the potential to have a major impact in the world. The opportunity provided by CAI to revitalize some of these products really excited me, particularly in the context of breast cancer (a disease process with high unmet need which has affected a number of my close family members).

Team Blog Contact - Name
Steven Ma

TED Talk About Your Team
We are energetic and enthusiastic. Our team of 5 students come from medical, scientific, entrepreneurship, and legal backgrounds. Our advisory board is strong and engaged. We are fortunate to be able to leverage biomedical resources at Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, and RTP.


Tell us about your core team members 
Fabio Goncalves has an MD degree from Fundação Técnico Educacional Souza Marques, and a MPH degree from Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro State University. He’s currently a second year MBA student at Duke University Fuqua School of Business, completing a summer internship at Eli Lilly. Prior to business school, Fabio was the CEO of a Casa de Saúde Santa Lúcia, a 130-bed hospital in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 

Roger song has an MD degree from Fudan University in Shanghai, China. He’s currently a first year MBA student at Duke University Fuqua School of Business. Prior to business school, Roger was a sales and marketing manager at Medtronic China for 7 years. He was in charge of their East China business. 

Steven Ma has a BS in Biology from Oregon State University. He spent 3 years studying the immune system at the Vaccine Research Center, National Institutes of Health (NIH). He’s currently a first year MBA student at Duke University Fuqua School of Business. Steven also has consulted for the NIH Office of Tech Transfer and was the founder of a web technology startup.

Zachary Finn has a BS in Biology and a BA in Spanish from Emory University. He’s currently a first-year medical student at Duke University School of Medicine. Prior to medical school, Zach was a research associate at the University of Minnesota’s Office of Tech Commercialization and was a market analyst for Dymedex Consulting.

James Whittle has an AB in Chemistry from Harvard and a PhD in Biology from MIT. He did postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School and the Vaccine Research Center, NIH. He interned at the NIAID’s technology transfer office before commencing the JD program at George Washington University Law School. 


Why are your team members in the challenge
Our team members are in the challenge to help drive technology commercialization. All five of our team members have scientific backgrounds and have developed a strong affinity toward medical science. However, we’re also motivated to help translate scientific breakthroughs into commercially successful products. 
Three out of five team members (Steven, Zach, and James) have experience in life sciences technology commercialization and have interned at tech transfer offices. We are driven to bridge the gap between basic research in the lab and commercial utility in the marketplace. 

Our drive for technology commercialization is ultimately to make a direct impact on patients. By choosing an education in health care, our team is dedicated to medical innovation. Two of five team members have gotten their MD degrees (Fabio, Roger) and one is currently in medical training (Zach). By having experience caring for patients in the clinic, our team is compassionate and have a deep understanding in the need for medical innovations. 
We also view the challenge as a fantastic opportunity to gain practical commercialization experience. As students, we are hungry for real-world experiential opportunities and for the chance to grow as future business, legal, and medical leaders. Our team saw the challenge as a unique opportunity to challenge ourselves and expand our skillsets. 

In sum, the competition represents the perfect combination of personal growth, working with cutting-edge biomedical breakthroughs, and helping to deliver impactful treatments to patients.