Teams of UCLA researchers vied for a chance at winning $20,000 in the inaugural Business of Science Center’s Venture Team Competition Monday night at the California NanoSystems Institute auditorium.
The two winning teams, Vascular Access Systems and SMRT Therapeutics, beat out 20 other student groups to take the top spots in the competition. The prize money is intended to help the two teams take the next step in marketing their research.
The announcement of the winners concludes a five-month-long competition designed to celebrate the Business of Science Center’s first year of operation. The venture competition has helped to expose graduate students to possible job opportunities, said Roy Doumani, executive director of the UCLA Business of Science Center.
Small groups of business and science graduate students worked with faculty inventors to evaluate the market potential of a UCLA innovation, Doumani said.
Richard Larson, a second-year master’s student in business administration and member of the Vascular Access Systems venture team, said the competition helped him to apply skills from marketing and business classes to scientific models.
“When working on the project, we had to understand what investors were looking for, the size of the market and the business model we could use to make money from the device,” he said.
Larson’s team worked on an automated device that would allow researchers to more efficiently make injections in mice through their tails.
“The award money is significant. It will help us to develop and test our idea to make it more marketable in the scientific industry,” Larson said.
The other winning team, SMRT Therapeutics, sought to expand its research for a drug to cure inherited diseases. SMRT stands for Small Molecule Readthrough Compounds, which induce genetic mutations that lead to diseases.
Most drugs only target one type of disease, but this particular drug will work to stop mutations that code for a variety of diseases, said Richard Gatti, the principal investigator for the SMRT Therapeutics project.
The competition entry was based on 30 years of research conducted by Gatti.
Gatti, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine, said the team decided to pursue the project because it could reach people on a global scale.
Last week, the teams were narrowed down to five finalists, who pitched their projects to a panel of industry professionals.
Each team was allotted about seven minutes to present in front of the panel of five individuals from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, international law firm Perkins Coie and the UCLA Clinical and Translational Science Institute.
Michael J. Wise, a UCLA alumnus from Perkins Coie, was among the judges.
“All of the projects we looked at were very deserving, but we had to pick the two that were most promising in terms of marketability,” Wise said.
He added that the winning projects were selected based on their need in the market and how well the solutions they provided met that need.
The two winning teams plan to go forward with their prize money in different ways.
The Vascular Access Systems team will develop its venture and ultimately hopes to sell licensing rights for the device to research companies.
SMRT Therapeutics, on the other hand, will try to test the effectiveness of its drug in disease treatment and prevention.
The competition will be held annually, organizers said. Both teams will present their projects in front of potential investors at a conference hosted by the Southern California Biomedical Council next month.