Tepper Startup Neurobank Takes Major BPlan Competition

A team of students from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon won the top prize at the Moot Corp business plan competition this past weekend. Moot Corp, held at the University of Texas at Austin, is considered one of the most important and prestigious competitions in the country. This year's winners presented NeuroBank, which has developed proprietary technology to extract and preserve adult neural stem cells. This was reportedly the ninth year that Tepper has taken the prize (making them the winningest school in the competition's 24 year history), this year beating out 37 competing teams from business schools and universities from around the globe. The NeuroBank teams consists of Tepper MBA candidate Raymond Sekula, M.D., and Sasha Bakhru, a Ph.D. candidate at the Carnegie Mellon College of Engineering. The two scholars have developed technology to: "...harvest, isolate, expand and store neurologic stem cells from cerebrospinal fluid, a clear bodily fluid around and inside the brain. The technology allows minimally invasive extraction, isolation, expansion and cryopreservation of these stem cells and supports efforts to expand their use in developing treatments for Alzheimer's disease, stroke or traumatic brain injury, among others. In addition, the technology will allow patients to store healthy neural stem cells today to receive cutting-edge treatments for diseases they might develop later in life." Raymond and Sasha will receive $25,000 in cash and

a variety of services including one year of strategic business consulting and mentoring, patent prosecution by Ropes & Gray, and consulting from the McCombs School of Business entrepreneurship faculty. The total value of the package is $100,000. As a nice bonus, the team members will be opening the NASDAQ Stock Market on August 15th in New York City. This isn't the first win for NeuroBank's breakthrough technology. The company also recently won third place in the Rice University Business Plan Competition, an event that is co-sponsored by Fortune Small Business magazine.