2008 Venture Finals – Solixia wins Wharton Business Plan Competition

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Wharton organized Business Plan Competition announced the 2008 Venture winner to be Solixia . Brian Smith, the inventor of the technology, & his team mate Irene Susantio earned US $ 20,000 in cash & services. The team is still completing their second year MBA degree & wants to work full time on the Solixia technology in the future. Winning the prestigious Venture Finals helps them to socialize the technology & its potential market to woo financiers.

The Solixia team patents the HotDot nanoparticle technology that could direct radioactive atoms to a specific area in human tumors. This would allow better detection of bodily tumors leading to early treatment & possible cure of cancers. Brian Smith & Irene Susantio created agents that could be initially used by oncologists to treat breast & ovarian tumors in women. However the technology could be expanded to detect any sort of tumors.

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The second place winner is Innova Materials . The team comprised of Alex Mittal, Priyanka Agarwal & Arjun Srinivas who made it possible to embed different materials in plastic in a very easy cost effective way. Their technology, which is names Innlay, would help impregnate plastic water pipes with a wide variety of materials like fragrance particles, anti-microbial medicines or even bio-sensors. The implementation could lead to better & cleaner water distribution over wide areas in a very cost effective way.

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Along with winning the second place & US $ 10,000 in cash & services, the Innova Materials team also won the Frederick H. Gloeckner Award for the best undergraduate-led team, which came with $5,000, and the People’s Choice Award, which came with $3,000.

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The focus in the teams clearly lay in evolving cost effective technologies to help mass population with better health & living conditions. While most of the teams attempted to bring in a Green aspect, the Creative Film worked on making a cheap way of making light sensitive films. The film could change it’s opacity with electrical pulses. The same technology is extremely expensive today & is used on sophisticated constructions like the Boeing’s Dreamliner jets and Maybach’s luxury cars. The Creative Film team will develop & market a cost effective technology to the mass population.

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The other teams that also participated in the Final Event of the presentation were Gelomatrix , iTherapeutics , Proteza , Sextant IP & Ultrasonic .

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