Freedom from Cancer Startup Challenge
The Freedom from Cancer Startup Challenge, CAI’s most audacious initiative, has united our nation’s brain trust against a common enemy -- cancer -- by breaking down silos across the entrepreneurial community, pharmaceutical industry, and academia.
BETHESDA, Md. (PRWEB) July 19, 2018
The Center for Advancing Innovation (CAI) announces winners of the Freedom from Cancer Startup Challenge (FCSC), generously supported by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and MedImmune. The overarching goal of this audacious initiative is to advance 100+ breakthrough inventions -- conceived and developed at 55 institutions, including the National Institutes of Health, the United States Army, and more than fifty American universities and hospitals -- to better prevent, diagnose, treat, and cure cancers. Since opening for entry in August 2017, the FCSC has supported 111 startups and more than 800 participants.
Rosemarie Truman, CAI’s Founder and CEO, said, “The Freedom from Cancer Startup Challenge, CAI’s most audacious initiative, has united our nation’s brain trust against a common enemy -- cancer -- by breaking down silos across the entrepreneurial community, pharmaceutical industry, and academia.”
A multi-disciplinary judging panel, comprised of industry experts, potential investors, philanthropists, and more, selected the winning startups, based on their 10-page business plans, financial models, 20-minute “live pitches”, and engagement in CAI’s White House-recognized accelerator program.
Winning startups, which have already incorporated a business, have begun negotiating exclusive licenses for their chosen inventions and will compete for seed funding from participating investors, recruited into the challenge by CAI. Startups recognized with the Innovation Excellence Award will receive a $2000 cash award.
Participants in the challenge have received several benefits from CAI’s partners and collaborators, including, but not limited to: McCarter & English, LLP; McKinsey & Company; Johnson & Johnson’s JLABS; and the Founder Institute.
The winning startups, their chosen inventions, and their target indications are listed on the website below:
https://www.freedomfromcancerchallenge.org/winners.html
CEO of one of the winning startups, Precision Medicine Drug Delivery Systems, Dr. Lonnie Bookbinder said, “We assembled a multidisciplinary team of seasoned and first-time entrepreneurs to commercialize technologies made available through the Freedom from Cancer Startup Challenge. The CAI challenge-accelerator program provides a platform to educate scientific entrepreneurs about corporate development and also expands scientific capabilities at the same time. The world needs this innovative program to advance potential cures for cancer.”
For more information on the challenge, please visit https://www.freedomfromcancerchallenge.org/
ABOUT CAI:
The Center for Advancing Innovation (CAI) is a global public-private partnership, non-profit focused on creating a virtuous circle of innovation and driving growth breakthroughs through novel, creative paradigms and models. CAI's mission is to accelerate and increase the volume of research commercialization in support of high growth business to ignite entrepreneurship, bolster the global economy, and maximize the commercial and knowledge-based potential of promising inventions. CAI’s award-winning challenge-based accelerator, rigorous evidence-based due diligence, and capital-efficient lean management models serve to hyper-accelerate “gazelle” high-performing startups for outsized investor returns. For additional information about CAI, please visit http://www.thecenterforadvancinginnovation.org