On Friday night (November 19), ten finalist teams pitched their business proposals to a panel of 4 judges, including 3 private equity investors and the AGSM Dean, Rob McLean. Eight of the ten finalist teams were composed of BIOT3091 students while the other two teams were MBA students.

After a sumptuous awards dinner at the AGSM restaurant, the winners were announced
by the AGSM Dean:

First place ($7,000 cash) went to Diploma in Innovation Management students, Disha Miglani (BIOT3091), Samantha Keirs and Helen McGuire for their business plan on "Protigene Pty. Ltd." - a spin-off of Dr Daniel Tillet's and Dr Paul March's (BABS) company, Nucleics. Protigene was formed to house the IP for Z-Taq, a 'Nucleics' fusion-protein based protein purification technology.

They did a fantastic job and thoroughly deserved to win.

Second place was shared between the BIOT3091 team "Crude-X-Tech" and the MBA team "Sentinel". The Crude-X-Tech team was comprised of Adam Goulburn, Sashi Fernando, Prath Thillinathan and Ramesh Harichandran.
Their business plan was based on technology being developed by Dr Mike Manefield (BABS) for a microbial solution for the removal of oil sludge in petrochemical storage/transport tanks.

Adam's pitch was slick, well-rehearsed, convincing, and sold the judges on the opportunity.

Overall, the BIOT teams excelled in the preparation of their Business Plans and pitches, with eight making the finals. The judges were unanimously impressed with the quality of the business plans and were amazed when they discovered that they had been prepared by undergraduate science students.

Lilly Ventures (VC) Managing Director and visiting AGSM academic Dr Ron Laufer sat in on all the presentations and commented throughout on what a great job the students had done.


Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that BIOT3091 students have come out on top over the last 3 years of the competition, winning 7 out of the 9 places on offer for a total of $27,000 in cash and $3,000 in other
prizes. This year, the competition was sponsored by the Federal Government's NIAS program, the AGSM and Blunt Solutions (http://www.blunt.net.au)