Colleen Nye and Loleta Robinson met as students, but their learning process hasn?t stopped.
Nye, an engineer with a background in biotech and Robinson, a doctor with experience in diagnostic companies were named third place winners in the fifth annual StartRight Women?s Business Plan Competition today for their plan to license and market a comprehensive, inexpensive diagnostic tool. The pair have formed a Baltimore-based company, Syan Biosciences.
“It?s integrated all the laboratory functions onto a single small chip,” said Robinson. “When you go into a hospital laboratory and they have all these huge analyzers, they take all that and make it smaller.”
Their winning plan, however, was the second go-around for the two women. Last year, they entered a business plan they developed after meeting at students at University of Maryland Baltimore County?s ACTiVATE program, designed to train women entrepreneurs to create technology-based companies.
They were named semifinalists in the competition, but were ultimately unable to license the related product. This year, they found a new product and used what they learned to create a new plan.
“The plan was significantly easier to write, because we had done it already, and we just tweaked it from the year before,” Nye said. “We just kept learning from [the first] plan.”
That willingness to tear it all down and start over didn?t impact their selection this year as third place winners, but spoke to their motivation, said Sally Sternbach, executive director of Rockville Economic Development, Inc., which gave out the awards.
“My guess is before they?re done they?ll be serial entrepreneurs,” Sternbach said. “They picked themselves up, dusted themselves off and looked around for another technology that could be licensed.”
The pair is still in the prototype stage of development, and are applying for federal grants to finance the project. Nye said they hope to have a product on the market by 2011.
“I thought they made a convincing case there?s a market opportunity and need,” Sternbach said. “If they can deliver a low-cost chip to the market, if I were you I would ride their coat tails.”
