As an individual, it is sometimes hard to believe that you can change the world, but through The Breast Cancer Start-Up Challenge, the Avon Foundation, The Center for Advancing Innovation and National Institutes of Health gave us the courage, tools, and the vision to believe we can. Now, we dream of developing a leading cancer therapeutic and making a difference in the lives of people across the globe.

We started as five students pursuing our individual paths, but through this competition we became a family. We are business people, lawyers, and scientists who believe that what we do matters. We have learned from each other and compliment each other’s skillsets in many ways. We have truly enjoyed the experience of growing with our company.

The Center for Advancing Innovation has guided us through the steps of developing our company, our business plan, growth strategy and forming our network. CAI has supported us by introducing us to investors, navigating through business issues, and connecting us with advocates. The CAI team brings an expertise and dedication that is simply unparalleled.

We thank Rosemarie Truman, Youhong Wang, and Jonathan Lui for their service and support. We could not have done it without them. 

- The BESPOKE Team: Alison Arter, Andy Bowline, Gonzo Estupinan, John Hodnette, Kyle Murrah, & Janel Suburu

Last year I had an incredible opportunity to be part of a startup challenge competition in partnership with the National Cancer Institute and funded by the Avon Foundation and The Center for Advancing Innovation. It was a competition based on promising breast cancer technologies selected from approximately 5000 patents.

Our team consisted of postdocs and lab technicians with various areas and years of experience; cellular signaling, animal surgery, cell arrest, molecular training and business plan writing. This was exactly the type of entrepreneurship experience I was looking for when I was a graduate student.   

There were several teams from various institutions across the country, the teams ranged in size, age, training, experience and educational background. The competition provided a perfect arena for scientific interests to collaboratively and creatively commercialize a product that could effectively enhance or replace current screening, detection and/or prognostic technologies. Our team was excited to meet each week to discuss our strategy. Yes, there was a financial incentive for the winning team.  There was a wealth of support throughout this competition that was facilitated by Rosemarie Truman, founder and CEO of The Center for Advancing Innovation.

We believe this challenge provided an invaluable experience that is unable to be replicated by any other possible course or business plan challenge.

- B. Guillory, Baylor College of Medicine

“Over 200,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer every year in the U.S. alone, and this kit can have a major impact on determining a more personalized course of treatment for these patients.  Our team is looking forward to building a startup to develop this technology and improve breast cancer treatment options for women around the world.”

- Brian Yu, Taxor Diagnostics

“The Challenge provided an unique and incredible opportunity to get involved in developing a life-saving breast cancer technology, and we’re excited to have put together such a strong team that will work hard to bring a product with multiple medical indications to market for the benefit of breast cancer patients worldwide.  We would like to thank everyone involved in the Challenge, especially CAI, the Avon Foundation, and Dr. Burg and her team at Clemson University. Finally, we want to extend a special thanks to Shafin Khan and his commercialization team at New Orleans BioInnovation Center for their continued support of our entrepreneurial efforts."

- Frank Glaser, Pectogen Therapeutics 

Radial Genomics
Cambridge University Invention #1
Nikolaus Wenzl
[email protected]

On February 10, 2013 my mother passed away after a 3 year battle with breast cancer. Walking beside her on her journey was a life-changing experience for everyone in my family and it is an unfortunately all-too-common experience to have. Approximately 1 in 8 women is diagnosed with invasive breast cancer in her lifetime and though advances in treatment have facilitated great strides in increasing survival after diagnosis, 40,000 women still die from breast cancer in the US every year.

Diseases like breast cancer, which wage total war against patients, are not easily resolved by currently available technologies, and new solutions are essential to solve the challenges they present. To that end, the Avon Foundation, The National Cancer Institute and The Center for Advancing Innovation have partnered to organize a "first of a kind" international, university student-based startup competition: the Breast Cancer Startup Challenge.  Launched in October, 2013, this Challenge provides an opportunity for students to develop a business plan for an innovative technology and launch a startup with the goal of bringing to market novel and high-impact technologies to tilt the scales in the fight against breast cancer.

My team is one of the winners of the business plan phase of the Challenge, and we are excited to be able to take our startup, Radial Genomics Ltd., forward. Early diagnosis is considered by many the foundation of recent successes in breast cancer survival rates, but increased screening efforts are a double edged sword: more and more cancers are being caught at a curable stage, but some early stage cancers are also being caught that may never progress or pose a danger to the patient. This ambiguity poses a difficult challenge for doctors. No current tool in medicine specifically addresses the distinction between early stage cancer and invasive subtypes, which require more careful and aggressive treatment planning to resolve, potentially leading to unnecessary surgery and/or chemotherapy. These early stage cancers account for 20% of all breast cancer diagnoses, and 25-50% of these cases become invasive within 10 years. Moreover, many patients do not want to risk their lives on a bet that a cancer may not develop. This makes treatment planning all the more challenging since over-diagnosis and overtreatment are chronic problems in our healthcare system today, harming patients and costing our economy billions.

Radial Genomics Ltd. is working hard to provide the solution to this ambiguity in early stage cancer diagnosis. We are a cancer diagnostics company using proprietary technology to diagnose and guide treatment in breast cancer patients through a novel, quantitative method of assessing changes in a patient’s genetic material in response to cancer. It is our hope that with our technology, we can improve patients’ quality of life and outcomes by giving doctors and patients the most comprehensive understanding of a patients’ cancer going forward.

My team is happy to be developing Radial Genomics Ltd.. As a biochemist, I have never stopped learning and growing since this team, which includes finance, law, engineering, and medical specialties, came together. A startup is a team effort and we and our mentors are confident we have the skills and passion to make Radial Genomics Ltd. and the promise of our game-changing technology a reality.

My own experience with breast cancer was a study in guessing and hoping. My team and I want to make sure that future patients never have to guess again.

Contributed by Grecia Gonzalez

Orpheden Therapeutics
Northwestern University Invention #5
John Kuelper
[email protected]

Orpheden is at an exciting point in the genesis of our company and of our novel Granulysin-based dendritic cell therapy (DCT) platform. After our success at the Breast Cancer Startup Challenge, our company is “thinking big” with our DCT platform, developing a dynamic business that will quickly bring our therapy to women’s and underserved cancers that are in dire need of it. We are actively implementing our plan and are gaining traction with strategic investors, business plan competitions, and clinicians and scientists who can help drive our company through the preclinical and clinical phases. It is a time of great growth for Orpheden, and we are excited as we continue to realize tangible outcomes from the theoretical possibilities of our business plan. 

Pectogen Therapeutics, LLC
Tulane University Invention #3
Frank Glaser
[email protected]

Pectogen is thrilled to enter the third phase of the CAI Breast Cancer Start-up Competition.  We are dedicated to improving the lives of cancer patients by delivering innovative hydrogel-based delivery approaches to market.  Our flagship product combines surgery and oncology disciplines into a best-in-class reconstructive option with potential therapeutic benefit.  

Over the past couple of weeks, we have outlined a rough operating agreement, engaged with leading researchers to discuss short- and long-term R&D plans, spoken with other groups to discuss potential collaborations, and outlined the licensing process with the office of technology transfer.  

Our team, with its diverse set of backgrounds and skillsets, has put us on a path to an exclusive license for this patent which will enable us to drive this important technology towards market.

Frank Glaser
Brian Hasselfeld
Parastoo Khoshakhlagh

PCV Therapeutics
Washington University in Saint Louis Invention #2
Hirak Biswas
[email protected]

Personalized Cancer Vaccine Therapeutics is an outcome of the Breast Cancer Startup Challenge organized by the Center for Advancing Innovation, Avon Foundation and National Cancer Institute. The mission of PCV Therapeutics is to create cost-effective personalized cancer vaccines, specific for each patient, to treat the cancer and prevent future recurrence. We are a team of enthusiastic and dedicated scientists who are passionate about this cause.

Harnessing the immune system to outsmart cancers:

The human immune system is highly efficient in detecting and eliminating pathogens. At PCV Therapeutics, we harness this adaptation to develop vaccines capable of detecting and eliminating cancers by training the patient’s immune system to recognize the cancer as a foreign pathogen, rather than a cancer. Our lead vaccine candidate has the potential to actively eradicate the cancer (therapeutic) and also prevent future recurrence and metastasis (prophylactic).

Because all cancers evolve differently, we personalize our vaccines to specifically target the tumor cells unique to each patient. This personalized approach equips our vaccine with the versatility necessary to combat any cancer type. This is especially valuable for cancers lacking drugable targets, such as Triple Negative Breast Cancer, which is very aggressive and is currently associated with very poor prognosis.

Progress Report:

PCV Therapeutics is going through an exciting phase of growth. We are in the process of incorporating our company in the state of Missouri. Our business plan is undergoing careful refinement to enable our license application submission to the Office of Technology Transfer at NCI and also to apply for seed funding. We are collaborating with Dr. Dennis Klinman, the inventor of our technology, and other KOL’s to integrate their expertise with our ideas in order to successfully advance this technology. We have arranged meetings with potential seed investors and are in the process of recruiting an experienced management team as well.

Oncolinx, Inc.
Rutgers University Invention #6
Sourav Sinha
[email protected]

At Oncolinx, Inc, our vision is to translate science and innovation into better patient outcome. Through the Breast Cancer Startup Challenge, we have been given the unique opportunity to take a technology through the clinical development process to make a meaningful impact on health. Our invention specifically is a novel class of cancer toxins that have the potential to improve the safety and efficacy of current antibody therapies and other targeted therapeutics.  The novel cancer toxin could empower targeted therapeutic options for a variety of patient populations and multiple cancer indications. 

Thus far our team has developed a draft of the clinical development plan for the invention with mentors and experts in the oncology world, as well as connected with industry partners who are interested in using our technology on some of their current targets to improve the efficacy of their technologies, and in turn, help us generate data.  As a team we are excited to persevere down this path and collaborate with the Center for Advancing Innovation, Avon Foundation, Rutgers University, and the National Cancer Institute to make a positive impact in oncology.

Heragen
University of California, Berkeley Invention #8
Gerardo Ramirez
[email protected]

When Rosemarie Truman told us we were one of the Breast Cancer Startup Challenge winners, we were thrilled to further develop and commercialize a novel technology that will potentially help save thousands of lives. Is this what we have been doing the first month? – Not even close.

Step 1: “Should we buy our domain www.heragen.com today?” – Naveen, my co-founder, asked me a day before we incorporated. After thinking about it, I replied, “No. If nobody has bought it yet, it will be available tomorrow and we can buy it through the company.” Of course the next day we found out somebody had bought the domain and they were now selling it for $850 (it was $10 the day before). This was the start of our entrepreneurial odyssey.

During the first month, we bought expensive domains, talked to lawyers, chose a company name, created a logo, and started to build a website. We learned really quickly that we need to prioritize and manage time effectively. Also, we cannot expect to start working on the actual product immediately. There are many steps before starting, but every journey begins with the first step – buying the domain while it’s still cheap!

What I also learned during this first month is that many people are genuinely excited to help you - whether colleagues, friends, family, or somebody introduced to us, we have had the pleasure of working with many passionate and driven people that have given us advice and helped us along the way. I believe fostering startups is a core value of the Bay Area culture.

The road is still long and full of unforeseen obstacles so stay tuned for our next steps towards the finish line.

Gerardo Ramirez
Co-founder @ Heragen
[email protected]