JHU Business Plan Competition
Overview
HMDN is privileged to co-sponsor the annual Johns Hopkins BPC. For more information, visit www.jhu.edu/bpc. Deadlines for 2008-2009 Competition are to be announced shortly.
Finalists for Life Sciences Category
First Place: AccuDiagnostiX ($5,000)
Neeraja Balachander, Kshitiz Gupta, Divya Paliway, Saurabh Paliwal
Stroke is the leading cause of disability and the third leading cause of death in the US and contributes to $56 billion in healthcare costs annually. Statistics reveal that stroke patients have the best chances of survival only if treated within 3 hours of the stroke. However, only 2-5% of eligible patients receive timely treatment, leading to 10% fatality and 75% disability. One of the primary reasons for this is the absence of any point-of-care stroke diagnostic test in the market. AccuDiagnostiX has developed a novel point-of-care diagnostic platform, AccuStroke, which is a dramatic improvement over existing stroke diagnostic approaches. AccuStroke will provide clinicians and paramedics with easy-to-use, mobile, economical and accurate stroke diagnosis in a much reduced time-frame; improving patient treatment and recovery in the critical hours after a stroke.
Second Place: Silexyn ($3,000)
Pichet Adstamongkonkul, Kryt Chattrabutti, Lisa Carey, Danielle Dorfman, Jan Lee, Sarah Shaake, Jean Wang
An estimated 5,000 patients a year require biliary tubes. Because of the nature of the disease and the material used for the current product, patients must return to the hospital every four weeks due to occlusion by bile sludge. The replacement procedure is difficult and expensive, making it extremely inconvenient for patients, their doctors, the hospital, and the insurance company. Furthermore, the current design makes the insertion and replacement procedure unnecessarily dangerous. Gastroenterologists and radiologists at the Johns Hopkins Hospital have agreed that there is a definitive need for a novel biliary tube. Silexyn’s Bilixyn technology has a unique design of a dual lumen silicone tube with nanostructured modifications of the inner surface. Bilixyn’s flexibility and longer life time increases patient quality of life. The reduction of replacement procedures and decreased risk of surgical complications also makes Bilixyn an appealing product for surgeons, hospitals, and insurance companies.
Third Place: RegenRx Pharmaceuticals ($1,000)
Curtis Chong, Ankit Mahadevia
RegenRx discovers new uses for existing drugs and re-introduces them to the market. We are collecting all 9,900 drugs ever used in medicine and are identifying new uses for infectious diseases, diabetic eye degenerations, and cancer. Because our collection is FDA approved, we bypass safety and toxicity clinical trials which are costly and time consuming.