This year’s McCloskey Business Plan Competition is in full-swing and the semi-finalists have been announced. Six of the teams going into the semi-final round on April 20 include current ESTEEM students. Here are the ESTEEM teams along with a summary of their projects:
Lineage
Team Leader: Shawn Cook ESTEEM 2017
Team Members: Paul Goebel ESTEEM 2017, Chris Stepien ESTEEM 2017, Eoghan Martin ESTEEM 2017, Nicole Cook, Rick Stepien BS 1985
Our company mission is to provide a platform to preserve family history in real time for future generations by encouraging users to create video interviews with family members. Customer will be able to store these videos and photos in their “vault”, have the ability to share with family members who are connected in their “family tree” and they can make these items visible to the public. Lineage gives people the power to proactively preserve their family history in a secure location.
Manufacture America
Team Leader: Madeline Zupan ESTEEM 2017
Team Members: Thomas Zupan
Manufacture America aims to bridge the skills gap that is crippling US manufacturing by pipelining talent from nil to skilled, ensuring program completion and retention through incentivized pull mechanisms. This venture enlightens young men and women about excellent career alternatives that are attainable for those individuals who have the aptitude and attitude to succeed, and by marshalling them all the way through the process. In return, strategic partner manufacturers will be enabled to grow the talent they currently struggle to acquire due to lack of resources and process.
PrevAllergy
Team Leader: Constanza Lengerich ESTEEM 2017
Team Members: Peter Deak PhD 2017, Michael Adams MBA 2017
PrevAllergy provides the most accurate diagnostic test for food allergies. This disease affects 1 in 10 children in the US, and they result in 300,000+ ambulatory-care visits annually. Parents urgently need to know the severity of their children’s allergies, and doctors struggle to diagnose symptoms because the current tests determine whether the patient is allergic or not, but cannot predict the severity. Food challenge is the only method to predict symptoms.
Unfortunately, 40% of these tests result in severe reactions, making it inherently dangerous. Our solution predicts the severity of food allergies, without exposing the patient to potential life-threatening reactions.
Structured Immunity
Team Leader: David Hardwicke ESTEEM 2017
Team Members: Tim Riley PhD 2017, Brian Baker, Fan Ping MBA 2017
Structured Immunity is a cutting edge, service based biotech company specializing in the optimization and enhancement of the human immune system for improved immunotherapy. Using our unique discovery and optimization platform, we engage with pharma and biotech companies to engineer patentable cellular cancer therapies with enhanced tumor targeting technology. Our platform can effectively increase drug efficacy, ensure immune system specificity and help to eliminate possible side effects and aid pharma and biotech companies in successfully gaining FDA approval.
SVEME Diagnostics
Team Leader: Cole Cravath ESTEEM 2017
Team Members: Matthew Curtis JD 2018, Christopher Tricarico BS 2015, James Clancy
SVEME diagnostics analyses common bodily fluids, such as urine and blood, for biomarkers that can indicate a cancerous lesion and lead to early diagnosis. This results in earlier disease treatment and increased therapeutic success. The diagnostic system utilizes a patented technology to isolate microvesicles from these bodily fluids which leverages microvesicles’ ability to protect biomarkers from degradation and their increased release by cancerous cells which amplifies the disease signal. As a result, SVEME is positioned to become the new standard in disease detection.
ThiraMed
Team Leader: Kellan Carney ESTEEM 2017
Team Members: Trung Nguyen PhD 2018
ThiraMed is a start-up pharmaceutical company that has created a novel, small molecule therapeutic for diabetic chronic wound care. It is a gel applied topically to the wound site, and it has been shown to accelerate healing by up to twice as fast in diabetic mice. Our goal is to provide an effective healing treatment that will prevent diabetic chronic wounds, which lead to 73,000 lower-limb amputations every year in the United States.
Originally published by at esteem.nd.edu on April 05, 2017.