November 30, 2005
Two bioengineering teams were finalists in the 2005 Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology’s 2005 Technology Breakthrough Competition, while s team from BioE and ChemE professor Jay Keasling’s lab took home the grand prize.
The finalist teams were:
Tissue-Engineered Nanofibrous, Stem-Cell-Embedded Vascular Grafts
An approach to tissue engineering that uses biodegradable nanofibrous scaffolds and stem cells to construct “smart” vascular grafts that may drastically improve heart patient success rates, by Bioengineering graduate student Craig Hashi and Assistant Professor Song Li.
Ultrahigh-Efficiency Opto-Thermo-Hydrodynamic Energy Conversion by Nanocrescent Particles in Water for a New Energy Source
Developed by Jaeyoun Kim, postdoctoral scholar, Berkeley Sensor & Actuator Center (BSAC), Gang L. Liu, Bioengineering graduate student and Luke Lee, Associate Professor of Bioengineering.
Our bioengineers shared the finalist position with one team from Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, and one from Mechanical Engineering. They will receive $750 as well as the opportunity to work with CET’s Venture Lab to commercialize their technologies.
The grand prize in the competition went to a team from Bioengineering and Chemical Engineering professor Jay Keasling’s lab – James Kirby, postdoctoral scholar in the Keasling Research Group and Eric Paradise, graduate student in Chemical Engineering submitted a project for the Metabolic Engineering of Yeast to emulate plant genes for use in cancer and malarial drugs, potentially reducing the cost of life-saving medications by 90% or more.
Bioengineering graduate student Robert Blazej and team were semifinalists for their Microfabricated DNA Sequencer project, as was professor Tony Keaveny and team for Biomechanical Computed Tomography.
Read the full press release at the CET.
Congratulations!