News: Launch of Brain Start-up Challenge on August 1st

Dear Sharp­Brains community,

We have read Alvaro Fer­nan­dez’s pub­li­ca­tion regard­ing the BRAIN Ini­tia­tive in Ven­ture Beat and thought our first-of-a-kind Brain Start-up Chal­lenge would be of inter­est to many of you.

To pro­vide some back­ground, the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health, Cen­ter for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion, Cen­ter for Advanc­ing Inno­va­tion and the Her­itage Provider Net­work, have part­nered to cre­ate a “first of a kind” Brain Chal­lenge. The Chal­lenge will fea­ture 20 rig­or­ous­ly select­ed brain relat­ed inven­tions 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. The last chal­lenge we launched exceed­ed expec­ta­tions and received men­tions from the White House, an exclu­sive from Nature Mag­a­zine and sev­er­al lead­ing media out­lets. The White House is fol­low­ing the Brain Chal­lenge very close­ly and we expect more than 1,000 peo­ple from around the world to participate.

A bit on the chal­lenge: teams with the min­i­mum of two grad­u­ate stu­dents and an entre­pre­neur may enter the chal­lenge, teams must have both busi­ness and med­ical exper­tise. A team may enter start­ing August 1st by select­ing one of the inven­tions and pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion about their team. There are three phas­es: ele­va­tor speech, busi­ness plan and start-up. The oppor­tu­ni­ty for par­tic­i­pants is prize mon­ey, launch­ing a start-up and rais­ing funds of up to $1 million.

To give you also some back­ground about how the inven­tions were select­ed: our team ana­lyzed 18,000 patents to find the inven­tions that were ulti­mate­ly select­ed. Our due dili­gence mod­el uses over 135 vari­ables to rig­or­ous­ly assess mar­ket attrac­tive­ness, oper­a­tional fea­si­bil­i­ty, medical/scientific via­bil­i­ty, etc. which led us to short-list the inven­tions select­ed. The NIH tech­nol­o­gy trans­fer spe­cial­ists and office of tech­nol­o­gy trans­fer also made sure the inven­tions were in the clear.

As men­tioned, the Brain Start-up Chal­lenge is now the sec­ond one that we’ve launched; the first one was the Breast Can­cer Start-up Chal­lenge. The Breast Can­cer Start-up Chal­lenge exceed­ed expec­ta­tions and is the largest in the world of its type in the first year run­ning. Our team received the HHS Inno­vates Sec­re­tary’s Pick award after 7 rounds of judg­ing for the Breast Can­cer Start-up Challenge.

–> We’re launch­ing the chal­lenge offi­cial­ly on August 1st and will start accept­ing entries. You can learn more about the Brain Start-up Chal­lenge HERE.

Best,

Rose­marie Truman
Founder and CEO, The Cen­ter for Advanc­ing Innovation

Relat­ed resources:

• Info­graphic on the Dig­i­tal Brain Health Mar­ket 2012–2020
• 2014 Sharp­Brains Vir­tu­al Sum­mit (Octo­ber 28–30th, 2014)