A team consisting of businessmen and researchers, led by a Providence native, that developed and marketed a possible alternative treatment for diabetics won $30,000 in MIT’s $50K Entrepreneurship Program.
The team, called SmartCells, includes John Hebert, of Providence, who will graduate from MIT’s Sloan School of Management with an MBA. He worked with Martin Curiel and Dr. Tsafrir Vanounou, both students at Harvard Business School, Todd Zion, a chemical engineering doctoral student who has been working on insulin delivery for four years, and Robert Bruch, who is completing his first year in the Sloan School of Management. They are working on SmartInsulin, a product aimed at improving existing treatment for diabetes.
“Todd considered diabetics as a possible market, and we identified the market, its value to the market, and where we had a competitive advantage,” Hebert said. SmartCells was awarded the first place prize on May 14 from MIT. The second place winners were NeuroBionics for its “pacemaker” for the brain, and Brontes for its low-cost real-time 3D-camera system.
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The five students had worked on their business plan since last fall, and a panel of judges – which included professors, venture capitalists and other entrepreneurs – chose SmartCells out of 118 other teams as the next successful company.
The $50K contest is the world leader among university business plan competitions and has resulted in the creation of more than 75 companies, with more than 2,000 jobs, since its inception in 1989. The competition is an entirely student-run program, according to Brian Curtis, lead organizer and a graduating MIT student.
Students compete in a contest for $1,000 in the fall before going on to the $50K.
Hebert and his team won that $1K last fall.
SmartCells’ Technologist Todd Zion developed the controlled drug-delivery technology for the team’s first product that they hope to sell to diabetics in the future. SmartInsulin, a once-a-day shot, provides patients with insulin release in proportion to the body’s blood sugar levels, allowing the insulin to self-release depending on the body’s needs, Hebert said. This technology, which Zion developed using nanostructured processing and intelligent biomaterials, would eliminate the need for diabetics to constantly monitor their diets, test blood sugar with painful finger pricking and numerous daily shots.
“In this market, the treatments for delivering insulin are either in non-invasive ways, with pills or a patch, or in regulatory ways with an insulin pump and with shots,” Hebert said. “This is a chemically engineered solution to deliver the drug when it’s needed. The particles only break down when the body’s insulin levels drop or rise.”
Zion designed the insulin particles not to leak, which allows the drug to respond to a patient’s individual body condition, Hebert said. Zion’s system is “pure innovation,” Hebert said, in that it acts differently depending on the patient and his or her diet. It will also allow doctors to more aggressively treat both Type I and II diabetes without worrying about hypoglycemia and long-term effects of diabetes like loss of limbs.
“This will dramatically change the quality of life for the patients,” Hebert said. “This would help give doctors another weapon in treating (diabetes) more aggressively and earlier.”
The $30,000 SmartCells was awarded is intended to be seed money, Curtis said, and the team will get the first installment up front and the other half a year or so from now, when they will go before a panel of judges as a sort of progress report.
Hebert said SmartCells plans to use the first $15,000 installment to handle launching and startup costs. He said he doesn’t expect their company to grow much in the first couple of years while some of its members are finishing school. Zion is beginning animal testing, and the results of that will give SmartCells more leverage in getting more financial backing.
“We’re very excited about this,” Hebert said. “We all committed quite a few hours on this.”
This is the fifth consecutive year that a life sciences-related team has won the competition, and Curtis said it’s no surprise that biotech is becoming more popular.
“A trend is that a lot of the interesting (business) plans are at the intersection of technologies,” Curtis said, using NeuroBionics’s pacemaker for the brain as an example. The innovation uses biotechnology as well as software and electrical stimulation.
MIT’s $50K Entrepreneurship Competition guides interested students through developing a marketable product, writing a business plan and proposal.
“We learned to apply all of the fundamentals of business-plan writing techniques, and business strategy techniques and apply them in a real-world situation that was a little less risky,” Hebert said. “It was also learning to work with a diverse team. We each challenged each other. It was a tremendous learning experience.”
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