The Winners
George Cimino, PhD, Paul Henderson, PhD, & Chong-Xian Pan, MD, PhD of Accelerated Medical Diagnostics
Anthony Santamaria, Daniel Misicak, PhD, Tomas Sudnius & John-Paul Farsight of Eco Catalytics
Accelerated Medical Diagnostics (AMD) won first place ($10,000) in the competition and Eco Cataltyics (EC) won second place ($3,000), as well as the People’s Choice award ($2,000).
The Angels on Campus program has again seen positive results from going onto the UC Davis campus to mentor teams taking ideas and research from the lab into the business world. This time it was the student run Big Bang! Business Plan competition. The finals were held on campus on May 19th and the first, second, and People’s Choice award winners, as well as one of the other five finalists, were all participants in the Angels on Campus program and benefited from the advice, connections, and mentoring received from members of the Sacramento Angels and others non-affiliated Angels.
The teams came from two different programs within UC Davis. AMD emerged from Partnerships for Innovation (PFI). Part of the PFI mission is to take technology at the intersection of engineering, life sciences and medicine, create companies, and contribute to our region’s economic growth. AMD are well on their way. What do they do? They have developed a diagnostic test that looks like it can predetermine if a cancer patient will respond to a particular type of chemotherapy, or not. Many people don’t respond to common treatments yet suffer painful, expensive, courses of treatment just to find out. It is estimated that over $2.5 billion is wasted each year on ineffective chemotherapy treatments.
EC emerged from the Center for Entrepreneurship Business Development Fellows program and the team formation component of the Big Bang! competition, which brought the PhD scientist, PhD candidate engineer, and MBA business students together. EC have developed a new process for making the platinum catalyst that is an important component of fuel cells. Their new process has the potential to reduce the cost of platinum use by 95%, which translates into a 25% or more reduction in the cost of the complete fuel cell. Fuel cells are currently used in multiple growing markets, including backup power, and powering specialized means of transportation. This team recently won 3rd place in the national Walmart Better Living Business Plan Challenge.
Another finalist, KardiGenics, a biotechnology company developing treatments for heart disease, recently connected with Angels on Campus through the Business Fellows program to further refine their business plan.
