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Five of this year's Wharton Business Plan Competition finalists proposed businesses that would improve healthcare through better means for treating wounds, making drugs or testing for serious illnesses such as breast cancer. The other three focused on information technology.
Below are summaries of the "Great Eight" finalists' plans.
Alumni Affairs Worldwide: Colleges and universities are hungry for alumni donations — as anybody knows who has fielded fundraising calls during dinner. Despite this persistence, the effectiveness of such appeals is lately tapering off, as fewer alumni are giving, says John Weaver of Alumni Affairs Worldwide. Weaver's company would change that by helping schools cement their ties with alums.
It would employ a three-tiered approach built on graduates' emotional link with their class. The company would use major reunions — say, the 10th or 25th — as a chance to connect. It would sell alums a class book filled with photos and reminiscences by classmates. It would extend on that with a class website and, through the website, sell such things as reunion tickets, clothing and memorabilia. "A lot of schools are doing little pieces of this, but none of them have integrated it," Weaver said.
Dynamic BioSystems: Actor Christopher Reeve, who was paralyzed in a horse-riding accident, died last year of an infection that originated with a bedsore. Dynamic BioSystems has devised a better way of treating wounds like Reeve's as well as diabetic foot ulcers.
The company's gel, called Diactif, would speed healing and limit scarring. "There are 60,000 amputations a year because of these kinds of wounds," said team leader Steven Chua. He estimated that the market is worth is $6.5 billion a year and will grow increasing numbers of elderly and diabetic people. Diactif could cut healthcare costs because it would reduce healing time and thus hospital stays, he said.
The technology that undergirds the gel is patented, and Chua and his partner, Shiladit Sengupta, have begun to work on an advanced formulation that wouldn't require refrigeration. If they succeed, the potential market for their product could expand significantly.
E-Ventures
Holding: If e-commerce is big business, so is Internet fraud, said Raghu Bala,
team leader
for E-Ventures Holding. "There's e-commerce
fraud, email fraud, data fraud and click fraud," he said. "People ‘phish' for
credit card information. They scrape data off of websites. They steal
passwords and access password protected sites."
E-Ventures would help companies fend off these sorts of threats with
a combination of hardware and software. The company's algorithms
are able to ferret out patterns of fraud and then block attacks,
Bala said.
Sure, he added, lots of companies hold themselves out as protectors of online innocents by, say, selling firewalls and spam detectors. "But we stand apart in that we focus solely on fraud," he said. "Our patent-pending technology is able to detect and take action against several simultaneous threats. It can detect fraud in different types of data. And it's self-learning — we've built in neural networks."
FibrinX: Here's a funky fact and, for FibrinX, a business opportunity: Fish blood clots more readily than mammalian blood does. That's partly why FibrinX would peddle a tissue sealant derived from the blood plasma of the Atlantic salmon. Tissue sealants are adhesives used to limit bleeding during surgery or after a serious injury. They stimulate the body's natural blood-clotting process, said team leader Dhaval Gosalia.
Competitors make their tissue sealants from mammalian blood. That presents problems because mammals can give each other such nasty diseases as AIDS, Mad Cow and hepatitis C. There's no evidence of these sorts of diseases being transmitted from fish to humans, Gosalia said. As a result, FibrinX's sealant would not only be safer but also would spare healthcare providers the cost of screening for blood-borne diseases.
IntuiTouch: Breast cancer kills thousands of American women each year. Everyone agrees that early detection is the key to curing the disease. Trouble is, the most common early-detection method — manual self-examination — is unreliable. Women often miss tumors until they're quite large.
Enter IntuiTouch. The company would sell an inexpensive handheld device called iFIND, which women could use at home to check themselves. It would use near-infrared light to locate tumors.
"The unique light-absorbing property of hemoglobin and the fact that growing cancers require more blood and consume more oxygen than surrounding tissues affords iFIND the ability to detect metabolic changes (early stage) rather than physical changes (later stage)," according to the IntuiTouch's business summary. In early trials, the device showed more than 90 percent accuracy.
IntuiTouch's surveys found that 83 percent of women would use such the iFIND if it were available. The device wouldn't replace mammograms, the leading detection technology, but rather supplement it by giving women an early warning that they should see their doctors.
Lemire Imaging: Where IntuiTouch wants to encourage women to get mammograms sooner, Lemire Imaging aims to replace the reigning breast-imaging technology. As far as its team members are concerned, mammograms stink. "Existing technologies are high cost, produce inconclusive results and are painful for patients," said team member Anya Schiess. "Ours is easier to use, safer and cheaper."
Mammograms employ radiation — X-rays — to create their images. In other words, they expose women to a potential carcinogen to detect cancer. Lemire's device, the LaserScan, would use light. "Light is scattered or absorbed differently depending on the type of tissue it encounters," Schiess explained.
Mammograms also are
uncomfortable because a woman's breast has to be squashed
against the scanner, she said. With the LaserScan,
the breast would rest in a box.
Mammography is so well established that it would tough to unseat. But the Lemire team members said they could sell their machine for $175,000, half of what leading scanners cost. They believe that doctors, hospitals and women's health centers would adopt their machine not just for its cost savings, but also for its greater accuracy.
Mujisan Pharmaceuticals: Oxycontin, the slow-release version of the opiate Oxycodone, has been called "hillbilly heroin." Junkies grind up the painkiller, destroying its slow-release properties, and snort or inject it. Mujisan Pharmaceuticals aims to sell a tamper-proof version of the drug, called PolyOxy. The company's technology would bind the drug to a novel polymer that can't be destroyed by crushing, dissolving or heating.
"Fifty million Americans face some sort of acute, chronic pain, either end-of-life pain from cancer, osteoarthritis pain or back pain," said team member Karoon Monfared. But many of them aren't getting the pain relief they need because some doctors are reluctant to prescribe Oxycontin out of concern about addiction and abuse.
"In 2004, only 17 percent of people suffering from chronic pain received Oxycontin," Monfared noted. Despite growing need, the amount of the drug prescribed actually dropped from 2003 to 2004. "PolyOxy's safety will drive market growth."
Valverde Computing: If you run, say, a stock market, you can't afford a second of downtime. Even in that fraction of time, hundreds of transactions and millions of dollars would be lost. As a result, stock exchanges as well as operators of other "mission-critical" applications tend to rely on mainframe computers. Mainframes are expensive to lease and maintain, but they're very reliable.
Valverde Computing has devised a combination of servers and software that provides mainframe reliability without its cost or complexity, said team leader Yan Pei Chao. The system is, in the information-technology terms, open system and open source. That means users — or rather their IT staffers — can see and, if necessary, tinker with the guts of their systems. In the past, users in this niche have had to rely on the "black box" solutions, Chao explained.
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