A team of innovators led by Columbian College students won first place in the tech venture track of the 12th annual GW New Venture Competition. They are developing a method to mass-produce a red blood cell product to improve the supply chain.
In the United States, more than 13 million units, or roughly 13 million pints, of blood are needed each year to treat conditions like cancer, traumatic injuries and chronic anemias. These transfusions rely on blood from human donors, collected mainly from nonprofit organizations. But Ichosia Biotechnology Inc., which was cofounded by undergraduate biology student Lucas Vining-Recklitis—the company’s CEO and lead researcher—is trying to change that.
“The idea is that we can grow red blood cells in the laboratory, on demand, and then in doing so reduce our reliance on donor blood and all of those donor blood-related problems [such as] red blood scarcity, the need for disease testing [of donated blood] and the need for cross matching,” Vining-Recklitis said.
Vining-Recklitis and his team—senior chemistry major Anna Grim, senior economics and biology major Ahmad Aljaberi and senior business administration major David Hyon—are developing a scalable method of mass producing an enhanced red blood cell product that they call Erythrosyn. The product will be synthesized through proprietary genetic engineering techniques that transform a stem cell into a fully-functioning red blood cell under controlled laboratory conditions.
Their work garnered the team $40,000 in funding support as the first-place winners in the tenure track portion of the GW New Venture Competition, which were hosted virtually in April. Organized by the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the annual competition provides students with real-world experiences in entrepreneurship and gives them the opportunity to work with mentors to craft a business model for a new business idea and compete for cash and non-cash prizes that can be used to jumpstart their ventures.
“We planned our application more than a year ago for participating in this competition,” Vining-Recklitis said. “My team is super excited.”
The 2020 New Venture Competition began in February with 206 teams, which were narrowed to 12 finalists. Teams competed for a portion of $215,000 in unrestricted cash prizes as well as over $300,000 in in-kind prizes.
The event host, Scott Stein, associate director of student entrepreneurship programs, said this year’s competition was the largest to date in terms of the number of participants and noted that the competition was the eighth largest collegiate competition of its kind in terms of prizes.
Tatyana Hopkins contributed to this article.
Main photo: From left, David Hyon, Lucas Vining-Recklitis, Ahmad Aljaberi and Anna Grim