UW Bioengineering Ph.D. students Marvin Mecwan, Ruying Chen and Alex Jiao competed in this month’s UW Foster School of Business Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship and Science & Engineering Business Association (SEBA) Science & Technology Showcase. The students received grand and second place prizes totaling $1,500. This annual event unites student innovators from across UW to pitch innovative ideas to a panel of judges — Seattle-area entrepreneurs and investors. The students received grand and second place prizes totaling $1,500. Read more about the competition at the UW Foster School Blog.
$1,000 Grand Prize, sponsored by WTIA: Z-ion+ Technologies, from Marvin Mecwan, Ruying Chen and Marleny Santos
Z-ion+ Technologies tackles End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) by prolonging the life of all implant hematology and cardiovascular related devices using gas plasma coating technology. The coating can be applied to vascular grafts and prevent proteins from sticking the graft surface, preventing clots. Hemodialysis treatment, including vascular access or AV grafts, costs an average of $89,000 per patient annually in the United States. In 2015, 650,000 patients were treated for ESRD and nearly 400,000 of those patients were treated with hemodialysis. Currently, 50 percent of all AV grafts clot within the first year and 75 percent clot by the second year.
$500 Second Place Prize, sponsored by UW’s Institute for Simulation and Interprofessional Studies: miPS Labs, from Alex Jiao, Ned Whalen, Aakash Sur, Jenna Strully, Rob Thomas
miPS Labs is creating consumer-focused collections and preservation of healthy adult cells for future use in stem cell therapies. miPS Labs focuses on the collection of young, healthy cells that have less of the DNA degeneration and mutation that occurs naturally as we age.
miPS also received the Best Idea for the Future Prize at the 2015 UW Business Plan Competition and was recently featured on Seattle’s KOMO 4 news.