Subject: Please help spread the word for a great cause - Breast Cancer Startup Challenge
Importance: High
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Over the last 10 months,our recent engagements have been with the Avon Foundation, National Cancer Institute and National Institutes of Health. We performed due diligence and portfolio assessment on more than 4000 inventions from more than 30 universities and and the NCI. The goal was to identify those inventions that had the highest near-term commercial viability. We got to the end of our assessment and then started our next phase, which was to take our short-list of 60 inventions and commercialize them. In the breast cancer arena, we found that investments/funding have been declining over the last 10 years in large areas of unmet need. As a result, for the short-listed breast cancer inventions, in partnership with the Avon Foundation and the NCI, we launched an international start-up competition using 10 of the short-listed inventions from the NCI and the Avon Foundation grantee portfolio. The competition marks the first time a therapeutically focused foundation has ever launched a contest such as this to progress research for their mission and also the first time a federal lab has used their inventions as the topics for a start-up challenge.
I'm reaching out to you as I'd appreciate your help in spreading the word to your alma mater, as each team requires three students (under-grad, graduate, post-docs, etc.). We've received letters of intent from several universities but our goal is to reach 100 in total – 10 teams for each of the 10 inventions in the contest. The due date is Nov. 1st for letters of intent and it will take teams probably a week to enter. I'd be grateful if you could just write one email to your alma mater contacts to see if they may have interest in participating – faculty, entrepreneurs, and anyone else may also participate. The website is here: http://www.breastcancerstartupchallenge.com/ I've copied some email content you may use and also some documents that you can circulate.
Many thanks for your assistance; the benefits are very broad – this challenge will advance inventions to help eradicate breast cancer; help post-docs get jobs; spur economic development and help to bolster entrepreneurial programs around the world.
The Avon Foundation, the National Cancer Institute and Center for Advancing Innovation have partnered to create a "first of a kind" Breast Cancer Start-up Challenge; you can find the website here: http://www.breastcancerstartupchallenge.com! The Challenge features Breast Cancer Inventions (9 from the National Institutes of Health National Cancer Institute and 1 from an Avon Foundation grantee) that have commercial viability and are important to public health. The primary goal of the Challenge is to stimulate the creation of start-up businesses based upon these inventions.
Teams may enter the contest until Nov. 1st. We have some fantastic teams that have entered with students from the medical school, business school and/or law school from University of North Carolina, Wake Forest University, Harvard, NYU, Rutgers, Ohio State, The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, etc. We'd love to see a team from your organization enter!
Do not hesitate to reach out with questions; you can contact Rosemarie Truman, CEO of CAI for more information at rt@thecenterforadvancinginnovation.org or 202 438 2208. Please share your enthusiasm for this Challenge on their social media sites: Facebook - "Breast Cancer Start-up Challenge" and Twitter - @BCSChallenge. We've been fortunate to get some great press from CBS, AUTM and BIO.
All my best,
Rosemarie Truman
Founder and CEO, The Center for Advancing Innovation
P 202-438-2208
rtruman@thecenterforadvancinginnovation.org
www.thecenterforadvancinginnovation.org
John F.S. Bunch, Ph.D.
Coordinator, Institute for Professional Ethics and Responsibility
School of Business
Benedictine College
Atchison, KS 66002
jbunch@benedictine.edu
913-360-7442 (ofc)
913-426-3445 (cell)
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