This March the Michigan Business Challenge (MBC) came to an end with Calcium Solutions being announced as the grand-prize winner. Calcium Solutions is a start-up founded by ME PhD students, Robert Chisena and Matthew Hildner, who developed a medical device named Plaque-Buster. The device was developed as an easy-to-use piece to safely improve the treatment of calcified, atherosclerotic plaques in cardiovascular peripheral arteries. Chisena and Hildner were awarded the grand prize of the competition and the award for the Michigan Investment Challenge (MIC) and was one of two for the Best Presentation Award.
The team brought Calcium Solutions to the MBC and reaped great benefits. The MBC is a five-month, multi-round business plan competition and they took home nearly $30,000.00 in cash prizes from the Samuel Zell & Robert H. Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies. The competition allows campus-wide student teams to test real-world business concepts by engaging in customer discovery, conduct market research, examine financial models, and develop full business plans. Through the course of the competition, over $100,000 was awarded to student teams.
This isn’t the first ME team to win the MBC, last year’s winner was PhD Student, Yang Liu and current ME post-docs, Jefferey Plott and Yihao Zheng, for their company Clot Buster. Their startup was awarded the $25,000.00 grand prize for their clot removal device and planned to use the money to seek venture capital funding to work towards clinical trials and hopefully FDA approval.
We send our congratulations to our Calcium Solutions, Clot Buster, and all other winners named in the MBC.