Newswise — A team of students from the University of Illinois at Chicago Liautaud Graduate School of Business are headed to national competition after taking first place at the 2006 International Business Plan Competition held March 23-25 at the University of San Francisco, the contest's organizer.
Liautaud students Caralynn Nowinski and Chirag Patel, both of Chicago, won the $10,000 first prize. Nowinski is student at the UIC College of Medicine and is also working towards an MBA with concentration in health management. Patel will receive a joint master of science in management information systems and an MBA with concentration in operations management and management in May.
In a competition that lasted three days, 19 graduate business school teams were selected from among 120 of the world's top universities to present original business plans and receive feedback from a panel of judges made up of top venture capitalists from the San Francisco Bay area.
UIC's team, SanoGene Therapeutics, proposed an idea to commercialize UIC-licensed RNA interference (RNAi) technology, for the development of cancer-fighting biopharmaceutical products. The SanoGene proposal draws on a discovery by Jasti Rao, professor and head of biomedical and therapeutic sciences at the UIC College of Medicine at Peoria.
In the semi-final round on Friday, SanoGene eliminated teams from Stanford University and two teams from the University of California, Berkeley.
On Saturday, five teams advanced to the final round of pitching their businesses in front of a 12-judge panel. Each team had 15 minutes to present a business plan with financial projections and funding needs.
SanoGene took first place, receiving praise from the judges as it eliminated teams from the University of Michigan, the University of Texas at Austin, Duke University and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
"Chirag and I are very excited to be representing UIC," said Nowinski, director of operations and R&D for SanoGene. "We hope for great things for our company and the university."
After the win, several prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firms invited SanoGene to submit their business plan for review.
In late February, SanoGene walked away with another $10,000 at the Graduate Spirit of Enterprise Business Plan Competition, organized by the University of Cincinnati. The team also earned a bid to compete in the prestigious 2006 MOOT CORP Competition, dubbed the "Super Bowl of World Business Plan Competitions," in Austin, Texas, May 3-6, to compete for more than $200,000 in prizes.
NOTE: Please refer to the institution as the University of Illinois at Chicago on first reference and UIC on second reference. "University of Illinois" and "U. of I." are often assumed to refer to our sister campus in Urbana-Champaign.
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