Idea for sustainably made drugs wins $10,000 in Johnson School's Business Idea Competition

By Linda Myers

An idea by a Cornell chemistry professor and his student team won $10,000 as the first-place winner in the 2005 Business Ideas Competition (BIC) at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management. The team plans to make medications through environmentally friendly processes that create less waste and cost less than standard generics. A low-cost version of the antidepressant drug Prozac will be the first product.

The yearly competition is sponsored by BR Ventures (BRV), a student-run venture capital group at the Johnson School that invests in early-stage businesses. In addition to $10,000 from BRV, the winner gets 20 hours of free legal assistance -- an estimated $4,000 value -- from Cornell's Entrepreneurship Legal Services (ELS), a group staffed by Cornell law students who help start-up businesses.

McQuade

The idea for the winning business, to be called Sustainable Pharmaceutics, was put forth by Tyler McQuade, an assistant professor in chemistry and chemical biology, and his research team of graduate students: Kristin Price, Steve Broadwater, Muris Kobaslija and Brian Mason.

In the world of drug manufacturing, for every pharmaceutical agent made, 25 to 100 kilograms (53 to 220 pounds) of waste is produced, according to a recent article in Green Chemistry, said McQuade. "We've come up with a process that's expected to reduce waste by five-fold and costs by two and a half-fold," he said.

"Pharmaceutical companies claim they can recycle waste but recycling is enormously energy intensive and, in my opinion, is a bad model because it creates so much waste and gives people a false sense" that they are not harming the environment, said McQuade. "Why not, instead, cut back on wasteful processes?" he asked.

He explained: "Solvents are where most of the waste is generated." To cut back on their use, he and his team developed a technology in which catalysts in the manufacturing process are encapsulated -- not unlike catalysts in natural biological processes -- to prevent them from harming other catalysts. The results: less waste and less money spent getting rid of the waste.

McQuade said he was inspired to create a sustainable manufacturing process when he read a book about it, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. "It got me thinking about how to be an environmentally conscious innovator," he said.

The second-place winner in the competition went to an idea for a business dubbed Illuminaria, of Ithaca, which aims to manufacture portable biosensors for point-of-care diagnostics that can quickly detect biological threats, including pathogenic bacteria such as anthrax. The team, led by Scott Stelick, a Cornell master's of engineering graduate, received $2,500.

The third-place winner was a plan for OTS Diagnostics of Ithaca, which seeks to make hand-held electronic kits that diagnose different diseases simultaneously and instantly. The team, led by current Johnson School MBA student Andreas Wankerl, received $1,000.

The winners were selected from seven semifinalists February 24 in Sage Hall, by a panel of venture capital industry experts. Entrants were asked to submit a two-page description of their business idea. Judging was based on the viability of the ideas and their attractiveness to investors. This year 103 entries were received, 16 from outside the Cornell community.

BRV members are second-year MBA students who are well-versed in venture capital and entrepreneurship. The Cornell law students who staff ELS are led by Zachary Shulman, the J. Thomas Clark Senior Lecturer of Entrepreneurship and Personal Enterprise at the Johnson School. The Johnson School also runs a business incubator, the Big Red Incubator (BRI). The triad of entrepreneurial services, considered unique on a college campus, may lead to many innovative, viable new businesses in the upstate New York region.