UCSD Entrepreneur Challenge Awards Top Honors to NeuroMap

The concept for a life sciences startup put together by neuroscientists, a psychiatrist, and MBA student received the top prize—and $57,000 in cash and services—in UCSD’s fifth annual student-managed business plan competition.

The proposal for NeuroMap, a seed-stage life sciences startup, was pulled together by Alexey Terskikh, a neuroscientist specializing in development and aging at the Sanford Burnham Medical Research Institute; Dmitri Sivstov, a psychiatrist at UCSD Medical School; Andrew Rabinovich, a bio-engineering researcher at UCSD; and Daniel Norton of the Rady School of Management. They outlined a commercialization plan for assays developed to determine the efficacy of antidepressant medications for individual patients, an approach to personalized medicine with the potential to reshape a specialty now dominated by “trial and error” prescriptions. The team estimates its technology would be able to save insurance providers and patients $2,500 per patient.

The second prize, which includes $28,000 in cash and services, was awarded to DevaCell, a molecular diagnostics startup led by UCSD electrical engineering doctoral candidate Inanc Ortac and recent Ph.D graduates Ahmet Erten and Corbin Clawson. DevaCell has focused on using advanced detection technology to help healthcare providers screen for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, the potentially deadly multi-drug resistant bacteria.

Third prize, and $15,500 in cash and services, was awarded to Interra Energy leader Thomas Del Monte for a system that turns biomass products into natural gas and soil amendment.

The 5th Annual UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge Business Plan Competition also awarded $2,000 prizes to the top entry in five categories: iConsent Medical (HighTech/IT); Oculeve (Biotech/Life Sciences); Interra Energy (Clean Technology); Mobcuts (Social Entrepreneurship/Consumer Product); and Lifelens (Undergraduates). The competition has operated as a wholly student and volunteer organization that hosts a series of free, public educational workshops on the commercialization process, networking events, and competition events each year.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.