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Catch of the Day: Piscine plan wins 2005
Wharton Business Plan Venture Finals
These days, salmon is seen as a wonder food, full of heart-friendly fatty acids. But the creators of FibrinX believe that's just the beginning of the health benefits that could be derived from the pink-fleshed fish.
FibrinX, which in April won the 2005 Venture Finals of the annual Wharton Business Plan Competition, aims to use salmon blood to create a wound sealant. Specifically, it would tap the blood's propensity to clot—fish blood clots more readily than its mammalian counterpart—which slows bleeding.
The minds behind FibrinX belong to Dhaval Gosalia, a Penn doctoral student in bioengineering, and Jonathan Goodspeed, a second-year Wharton MBA candidate. They teamed up in the 2004 Wharton Business Plan Competition, too. Last year, with a friend, they took third place with a plan for a drug-development company called BioSpectrum.
The annual Wharton Business Plan Competition, which culminates with the Venture Finals, attracted more than 200 teams this year. In all, about 1,000 students participated, either by joining a team that submitted a plan or by attending one of the workshops on entrepreneurship and communication that are part of the four-stage competition.
"From a Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs standpoint, this is our flagship program," said Prof. Raffi Amit, co-director of Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs. "It's an important part of our mission to create and disseminate knowledge."
This year's plans were "the strongest group we've seen to date" in the seven-year-old competition, Amit added.
Six judges evaluated the "Great Eight" finalists plans and their 10-minute presentations; they then interrogated each team during a 10-minute question-and-answer session. The judges, all investment professionals, hailed from Johnson & Johnson, Perseus Group, Arboretum Ventures, First Round Capital, Sienna Ventures and Arzu Inc.
"Our criteria was, ‘Which plan is most ready for venture capital funding?'" said David Piacquad, a judge and also vice president for ventures and business development at Johnson & Johnson. "The factors we looked for were a clear market need and a clearly articulated value proposition."
As grand-prize winners, Gosalia and Goodspeed received $20,000 in cash and up to $10,000 in legal, accounting and management-consulting services. In addition, they win are automatically admitted into the Wharton Venture Initiation Program where they can gain valuable mentoring and administrative support to further develop their venture.
The second place prize of $10,000 went to a team called IntuiTouch, which proposed commercializing a handheld breast-cancer detector. The device, which would sell for $100, would replace manual self-examinations, today's first line of screening.
Self-exams are only as good as the examiner, and many women miss their tumors, especially in the early stages, said IntuiTouch team member Michael Herr. Early treatment is the key to curing breast cancer.
IntuiTouch's device, called iFIND, is built on technology developed by Britton Chance, a Penn professor of medical physics. This is the second time that a plan based on one of Chance's invention has reached the finals.
Last year's first-place plan, InfraScan, aimed to harness Chance's idea for creating a handheld device to detect brain bleeding. InfraScan used its Wharton BPC win as a springboard to raising seed money. [Read an update on InfraScan's progress HERE].
IntuiTouch also won the Frederick H. Gloeckner Award as the best undergraduate team. To qualify for the Gloeckner, at least half of a team's members must be undergrads.
Third place and $5,000 went to Dynamic BioSystems. It would commercialize a gel, called Diactif, to treat wounds such as bedsores and the foot ulcers that afflict diabetics.
Like FibrinX, IntuiTouch and Dynamic BioSystems will receive in-kind contributions of legal, accounting and consulting services.
Rounding out this year's Great Eight were Alumni Affairs Worldwide, E-Ventures Holding, Lemire Imaging, Mujisan Pharmaceuticals and Valverde Computing. Read summaries of their plans as well as additional information on the top three finishers HERE.
As for Gosalia and Goodspeed of FibrinX, they hope to use their cash winnings to turn their plan into a startup. "Winning the Wharton BPC has given our idea a lot of momentum and validation," Goodspeed said.
The next step is sorting through their job options for next year, as both students expect to graduate in May. "FirbrinX is definitely top of mind," Gosalia said.
The pair originally met through Penn's Center for Technology Transfer. Gosalia went there seeking help with writing a business plan based on technology that he was exploring in his thesis research. Goodspeed had dropped by in hopes of sniffing out promising technologies. The center's director suggested they collaborate.
After exchanging a few emails, they met over pizza, and found that they clicked. "We're both driven with a lot of energy, and we both share an interest in technology and how it can play a role in the world," Goodspeed said.
Take their sealant. They say it'll be safer and cheaper than those of competitors, which are made from mammalian blood.
Mammals can give each other each other such nasty diseases as AIDS, Mad Cow and hepatitis C. Healthcare providers therefore must carefully screen mammalian sealants. They same level of screening shouldn't be necessary with FibrinX's sealant.
If that sounds fishy, consider this: "There's no known evidence of blood-borne sorts of diseases being transmitted from fish to humans," Gosalia said.
After all, people and fish are separated by "400 million years of evolution," he pointed out. "But our blood clotting systems are very much the same."
Assuming Gosalia and Goodspeed decide to push ahead with FibrinX, North America's biggest salmon farmer has agreed to provide the blood they would need.
In some ways, their plan depends upon salmon farming, an industry that has boomed in the last decade. "Before salmon farming, this idea couldn't have been brought to market," Gosalia said. "That provides a regulated source of salmon blood. The FDA wouldn't let you do this with wild salmon."
The first obvious application of the FibrinX sealant is military medicine. "Fifty percent of the soldiers who die on the battlefield die because of excessive blood loss," Goodspeed said. The U.S. Army and Navy already are funding pre-clinical trials of the technology, which is protected by six granted patents and three pending approval.
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