In case you haven’t heard enough about business plans lately (think MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, the Ignite Clean Energy Competition, and the $200K MIT Clean Energy Entrepreneurship Prize), here’s another bit of news that might have passed unnoticed: Differential Proteomics, a biotech startup based in Beverly, MA, recently won the $10,000 first prize in the 2008 North of Boston Business Plan Competition.
North of Boston, now in its fourth year, is open to early stage and start-up companies in Essex County and the Merrimack Valley region of Massachusetts. “This is less about the money, more about having to put down your business plan on paper and compete against other companies. It’s a way of getting everything in shape, spring training for capital raising,” says Differential Proteomics CEO Philip Holberton, one of the company’s three founders.
The 18-month-old company is aiming at the fast-growing market for diagnostic tests (the same field as Harvard spinoff Diagnostics-For-All, which brought home the top prize in the MIT 100K competition). It wants to identify less abundant proteins in the blood, serum, or cells that are significant biomarkers for diseases by comparing samples from persons suffering from a certain disease with samples from healthy persons.
