Elucent Medical’s device for improving breast cancer treatment might not hit the market for two years, but the idea and the team behind it showed enough promise to capture the grand prize in this year’s Wisconsin Governor’s Business Plan Contest.
Elucent beat out 12 other finalists in the annual competition run by the Wisconsin Technology Council, which culminated in a live pitch event at the Tech Council’s two-day Wisconsin Entrepreneurs’ Conference in the state capital of Madison. Elucent also took first place in the competition’s life sciences category. The other winners in each category were:
—Advanced manufacturing: Madison-based MobCraft Beer, a brewer that crowdsources its recipes.
—Business services: Milwaukee-based Find My Spot, which simplifies the rental process for professionals moving to new cities.
—Information technology: Milwaukee-based Organic Research Corp., which is developing software to help pathologists identify fatty deposits in the liver that aren’t caused by alcohol consumption. This condition typically shows no symptoms, but severe cases can cause liver failure.
This year, the council received 292 contest applications from startups around the state. Finalists were vying for a piece of the more than $100,000 in cash and in-kind services pledged by the contest’s sponsors.
Madison-based Elucent is developing a wireless marker and detection system for breast cancer treatment that is intended to eliminate the need for traditional “hook wire” procedures, which involve placing a wire in the breast at the spot of the tumor so the surgeon knows which tissue to remove. Elucent’s system would use a biocompatible breast “tag”—a spherical object less than 2 millimeters wide—that would be implanted in the breast at the time of a biopsy. A doctor would then use
