SBIR awardees benefit from SBTDC's MBA intern program

The University of North Carolina's Small Business and Technology Development Center (SBTDC) 2005 summer MBA internship program kicked off in mid-May. The SBTDC is the liaison between early-stage, RTP-based tech firms and MBA programs, including the Kenan-Flagler School of Business at UNC-Chapel Hill, the Babcock Graduate School of Management at Wake Forest University, and the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.

Each summer, second-year MBA students are matched with high potential, small tech firms that have a clearly defined, short-term business project. Interns work with one or two firms during the ten-week program. Since its inception, dozens of firms have leveraged thousands of hours of assistance through the SBTDC's MBA intern program.

To reduce the logistical burden on the client companies, the SBTDC interviews, selects, and places the students. Each intern is mentored by an SBTDC technology counselor throughout the period. Mentor, client, and student meet regularly to assess strategies to keep the projects on target. In the end, all results are evaluated. SBTDC mentors for 2004 are John Ujvari and Scott Rockafellow.

Past projects have included financial analysis, valuations leading to equity investments, preparation of early-stage business plans, competitive analyses, evaluation of alternative business models, market research, and assessments.

This summer alone, nine MBA interns will provide more than 3,600 hours of service across North Carolina to more than a dozen local firms. Attesting to the prevalence of the SBIR program in our tech community, many of these firms are currently seeking or have been awarded SBIR funds. Some of the firms participating this summer are highlighted below.

3-C Institute for Social Development
The 3-C Institute for Social Development (3-C ISD) is a research company based in Cary, NC that develops tools to help children build positive social relationships. 3-C ISD has built a uniquely talented staff of former teachers, school counselors, university graduate students, software designers, and mental health professionals to address significant social problems like bullying, rejection, and social isolation. To this end, 3-C ISD creates and delivers scientifically validated assessment and intervention tools for professionals and parents. Since its inception, 3-C ISD has received over a dozen federal contracts and grants to support its efforts, including numerous SBIR awards.

Advanced Animal Diagnostics
Advanced Animal Diagnostics, Inc. (AAD) is a small, private diagnostics development company based in North Carolina's Research Triangle Park. AAD plans to build a business by providing a new diagnostic tool that makes a significant difference in the worldwide dairy industry. The new tool permits the earlier detection, staging, and treatment of mastitis, currently a common dairy problem affecting milk quality and animal health and costing the industry billions of dollars per year. Better diagnostic information is needed for individual cows at milking sites in order to better manage the health status of the entire herd before milk is pooled into bulk tanks. AAD will commercialize the first significantly different new technology in 40 years- a, rugged, portable, cost effective, automated differential cell counting system — the Inflammatory Cell Differential Counter (ICDC).

AAD's intellectual property and technology platform will allow for follow-on products and services. However, the company's analysis suggest that the mastitis market alone (over 60 million dairy cows in the industrialized world) is sufficient to create a significant revenue-producing company in the very near-term.

BioLink Life Sciences
BioLink, a North Carolina biotech company that is developing innovative products which enhance the safety of foods, drugs, and diagnostics, met with the FDA in early February to discuss BioLink's PRO-Dye solution to the meat packers' problems with contamination detection. FDA personnel also noted the potential positive impact of BioLink's innovative PRO-Dyes and invited the company to work with them to eliminate carcinogens and disease-causing contaminants in the American food supply.

In addition to its activities in improving contamination detection in foods, BioLink focuses on enhancing the efficacy and safety of registered "blockbuster" drugs that have significant bioavailability defects, such as poor uptake from the digestive tract, enzymatic modification to an inactive form, or undesired side effects related to poor drug delivery profiles. By retaining the therapeutic activity of the parent drug and minimizing its side effects through modification to a prodrug, the time and cost of development for FDA approval of the prodrug are significantly reduced. The company has filed several patents to protect its technologies and has begun to work with pharmaceutical partners to commercialize, market, and distribute its novel therapeutic conjugates.

Cropsolution
Cropsolution uses its proprietary Targeted Biology™ platform to discover novel fungicides, herbicides and insecticides. The global crop protection chemical market is $32 billion, and is in acute need of new compounds that act in novel ways and are safe and efficacious. Cropsolution's business model is to discover new active ingredients, evaluate their performance in the field, and then partner them exclusively with a major agrochemical firm for commercial development. Cropsolution's first product, a novel fungicide, is in field testing this summer. The company has 19 employees at laboratories in Morrisville, NC and Mountain View, CA.

Eno River Labs
Eno River Labs, LLC (ERL) provides analytical data to the environmental and pharmaceutical/CRO industries. Their environmental services group provides dioxin/furan and PCB testing of environmental samples for a variety of industries including engineering firms, state regulatory and public health agencies, and the EPA) and manufacturing using high-resolution gas chromatography/high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRGC-HRMS) techniques. Their bioanalytical services group also performs method development, GLP validation, and GLP sample bioanalysis for pharmaceutical therapeutics via liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS). ERL works directly with pharmaceutical companies during their drug development as well as other contract research organizations.

Innovatech
Innovatech has received a Phase II SBIR from the National Science Foundation to support research and development of a highly efficient biological collector/sampler that will be used in biological detection systems for military, homeland defense, and commercial applications. The company specializes in developing filtration and fine particle classification systems for mission-critical applications, based on a patented technology for particle separation that does not employ barrier filter media that can blond or clog. The NovaBioCon represents a 'next generation' biological collector/sampler that has demonstrated performance superior to conventional systems and, when deployed, will enhance cost-effective, real-time bio-detection for national defense.

Lookout Systems
Lookout Systems provides information management and analysis for emergency medical and disaster preparedness systems. Local or institutional electronic data sources are collected, standardized, aggregated, and reported in real-time or near real-time fashion, in conformance with contemporary electronic security standards. Lookout Systems offers a customized GIS based biosurveillance system to address the growing concern of detecting, analyzing, and tracking disease incidents.

Mediwave Star Technology
Mediwave Star Technology Inc. is developing technologies which allow quantitative prediction of cardiac ischemia and risk for ventricular arrhythmia. The company's technology involves easily conducted, non-invasive testing of an individual during quasi-stationary exercise or other controlled cardiac stimulation. Certain data are collected while very gradual changes in the exercise or stimulation protocol precipitate changes in the individual's cardiac function and response. Those data are analyzed using proprietary MediWave algorithms; quantitative measures are generated; and those measures are compared against certain norms.

Mi-Co
Mi-Co, the mobile data capture company, provides handwritten forms automation software that enables an efficient and effective process for capturing, recognizing, and communicating handwritten information. Mi-Co's enterprise Mi-Forms Software System provides flexible electronic forms design for data capture using digital ink. In addition, Mi-Forms Software has proven capabilities for handwriting interpretation and verification, data validation and the communication of forms-based data for enterprise and government users. Mi-Forms supports Tablet PCs, Digital Pens, Pocket PCs and signature capture devices. The company is headquartered in Research Triangle Park, NC and has a Seattle, WA customer service center.

Polyglot Systems
Polyglot Systems, Inc. (Polyglot) is an information technology company that builds products to enable communication across language barriers. Polyglot was founded by a physician to help the US healthcare system better care for the more than 20 million Americans — or one in every fifteen people — who cannot communicate effectively in English. The company's first product, ProLingua, is a multi-language translation service developed for hospitals to improve care to patients who cannot speak English. ProLingua helps healthcare organizations reduce risk and liability, increase perceived quality of care, meet regulatory compliance issues, provide staff diversity training, and reduce health disparities.

Southeast TechInventures
Southeast TechInventures, Inc. (STI) was formed to build an effective and profitable technology accelerator for converting university scientific breakthroughs into products, services, and the formation of new technology companies. STI partners with universities, inventors, government funding agencies, private investors, and corporate entities to provide the structure, processes, and funding needed to bring new technologies successfully to market.

For any given STI portfolio technology, STI's operating model and experience guides and supports the new entity quickly along the path to commercialization. Activities provided by STI may include the following: obtaining an intellectual property license from the applicable university, assisting in further developing the technology in partnership with the inventors, establishing the entity as a spin-off company, providing financing contacts, and providing experienced business guidance and mentorship.

Zen-Bio
Zen-Bio is a leader in the human primary adipocyte market. It has developed patent-protected, cultured human adipocyte and assay systems used in the study of metabolic disorders. The company was founded in Research Triangle Park, NC in 1995 and and currently provides products and services to over 900 researchers worldwide. Zen-Bio is positioning itself to be the premier human primary cell culture organization and continues to expand upon its expertise by developing additional human primary cell systems and reagents involved in metabolic disease research. Previous research and development at the company has yielded numerous patents and breakthroughs in the field of tissue engineering. Zen-Bio's current research and development focuses on the role obesity plays in the development and onset of metabolic disease. The company has active research collaborations using its unique procurement network, isolation, and culturing technologies in conjunction with partner's cutting edge proteomic, metabolomic, and gene expression technologies.