When my mother passed away, I was devastated. But this competition became an opportunity to channel that difficult experience into a project that will hopefully go on to have a positive impact on breast cancer treatment and peoples’ lives.
- Grecia Gonzalez
The two teams are among 10 winners of the first Breast Cancer Startup Challenge, run by US organisations The Center for Advancing Innovation (CAI), the Avon Foundation for Women, and National Cancer Institute (NCI), a part of the National Institutes of Health. The competition is the first of its kind and was launched last September.
The teams will receive a $5,000 award from the Avon Foundation for Women and CAI. The money will allow them to take the business to the next phase with their start-up. They will also be put in touch with venture capitalists and different funding bodies who can provide more seed funding.
The Challenge is aimed at teams of business, legal, medical/scientific, engineering, and computer science students, as well as seasoned entrepreneurs and gives them the opportunity to create strategic business plans and start new companies focused on developing and commercialising 10 inventions that the NIH deems to have high potential to benefit the treatment of breast cancer and potentially other diseases.
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Image: Electron microscopic image of a single human lymphocyte. Credit: Dr Triche, National Cancer Institute
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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