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CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 16, 2003 — Yet another sign that nanotechnology has arrived: A nanotech business plan has won the prestigious $50K Entrepreneurship Contest at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this year.
SmartCells, a team of five graduate researchers and business students using nanoparticles to treat diabetes, trumped seven other finalists in a ceremony Wednesday to announce the winner. The team has already filed a provisional patent application, and now plans to secure a license from MIT to commercialize the technology.
Three other finalists also based their business plan on some aspect of MEMS or nanotechnology, an unprecedented number for the 14-year-old $50K Contest. Indeed, the first nanotechnology business plan ever to reach the finals appeared only last year.
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“You’re seeing the beginning of a wave here that will keep coming for the next 15 or 20 years,” said Greg Schmergel, chief executive of Nantero Inc. and a judge at the contest. He does not expect a flood of hundreds of nanotech plans in the coming years, as happened with dot-coms five years ago. “That wave crashed. This one is quite different.”
Winning the $50K Contest is a coup of the highest order. Aside from the $30,000 grand prize (the other $20,000 is split between two runners-up), winners get invaluable exposure to venture capitalists, researchers and business executives. Almost all finalists, regardless of whether they win, proceed to mold their ideas into startup businesses anyway.
Past winners include the search engine Direct Hit in 1998, acquired 18 months later by AskJeeves.com for $500 million. Other winners are WebLine Communications and SensAble Technologies. Even the losers often hit paydirt; Akamai Technologies lost out to Direct Hit, but still became one of the most glamorous startups of the Internet heyday, and has annual sales of $145 million today.
SmartCells’ technology bonds insulin molecules and sugar-sensitive proteins to a biodegradable polymer and injects the nanoparticles into a repository under the skin. Using what team spokesman Todd Zion would only call some proprietary “clever biochemistry,” the nanoparticles detect a diabetic’s glucose levels and release appropriate amounts of insulin to keep blood sugar levels steady.
The particles themselves can be anywhere from 80 nanometers to 1 micron in size, Zion said. Because they monitor and react to glucose levels on their own, diabetics could administer the treatment with only one daily injection, rather than the several pinprick glucose tests and insulin shots diabetics use now.
Zion, a doctoral candidate in chemical engineering, developed the technology while working at MIT’s Nanostructured Materials Research Lab with Professor Jackie Ying. “People have been looking at this for years,” Zion said. “It was very difficult.”
SmartCells would sell the nanoparticles — dubbed “Smart Insulin” — at a premium, so the cost of the drug would be more expensive than what the nation’s 17 million diabetics pay today. But the total cost of caring for diabetes would be lower, since the expense of blood testing and insulin injections would be eliminated.
SmartCells has already done preliminary tests in the petri dish, Zion said, and is now conducting animal tests at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston.
The three other MEMS or nanotech-related finalists were:
- Granular Ink, targeting the semiconductor industry with a nanoscale lithography process to make chip features smaller than 50 nanometers. Granular Ink lays ultrasmall wires on a chip substrate before layering the usual photoresist on top so it can make more delicate features. By doing so, the team says, chip makers can create smaller features but still use their existing fabs for mass production.
- Hepatometrix, which uses microfluidics to make a bioreactor that functions as a “liver-on-a-chip.” Hepatometrix wants to use its artificial liver to test new drug compounds for toxicity before they go to clinical trials. Currently, pharmaceutical companies cannot measure toxicity very well until drug compounds are tested in costly human trials, because researchers have not been able to mimic liver function in the petri dish.
- MolySym, with a computer modeling technology to let researchers visualize molecular designs more easily. A person can use the MolySym hardware and software to manipulate a model by hand. Model parts have electronics in them to be aware of what they are and how they should react with other nearby parts; the assembled design is transmitted wirelessly to a computer, which can then analyze the design for its physical and chemical properties.
Schmergel praised all of the participants’ business plans for their understanding that it will take more than cool nanotechnology to succeed as a business. “They didn’t just have a strong grasp of the technology, but also of their customers and their customers’ needs,” he said.