STARKVILLE – Before pharmaceutical drugs are tested on human subjects, they are tested on human cells in petri dishes.
These dishes are usually glass or plastic and not even slightly representative of the human body, which creates an expensive problem that Humimic Biosystems Co-founder and CEO Lexi Applequist and her team are trying to solve.
“Because we don’t have very good models to study on in a lab setting before we put things into humans, we see about 90% of the drugs that we’re testing on patients in clinical trials are either ineffective or have those toxic, adverse side effects, and so they never actually reach the market,” Applequist said.
Applequist, who is a biomedical engineering doctoral student at the University of Arkansas, said Humimic Biosystems has developed what she describes as “a fancy petri dish” that mimics the surface of human tissue and the blood flow that the potential medicines could affect.
The idea, she said, is to make sure ineffective drugs “fail fast and fail cheap” before they make it to human or animal test trials.
On Friday, that idea earned Applequist and her team a $30,000 prize out of more than $100,000 awarded at the Mississippi State University Startup Summit business competition hosted by the Center for Entrepreneurship and Outreach, which is also known as the E-Center. The summit gives competitors a chance to pitch their business plan to a panel of judges.
While it was previously only open to students and alumni, the competition expanded this year to open up the opportunity for emerging entrepreneurs from across the county, like Applequist, to win prize money to support their business.
E-Center Director Nick Pashos said the goal in expanding was to create a larger network of competition and innovation that crosses regional borders.
“The more competition the better,” he said. “I think it helps people grow and it pushes them. It drives innovation and the desire to do better.”
Split into two categories, both companies and student entrepreneurs participated in the competition. In the Mississippi Made competition, in-state companies pitched their business plans on Thursday. Students from across the country presented their plans Friday in the Bulldog Business competition.
For students like Applequist, prize money goes a long way in expanding business. While some of her team’s $30,000 will be spent on administrative expenses, the bulk will go toward purchasing selling rights to the technology.
“We have a line of people ready to purchase,” she said. “We just haven’t been able to get that licensing agreement yet. So we’re excited to use that money to then turn around and be able to get some good revenue and keep going from there.”
Max Wamsley, an MBA student and doctoral graduate at MSU, won the $10,000 top prize in the Mississippi Made category after pitching his company CLARUS Labs, which developed a methodology to test oxidation levels in meat and pet food to ensure freshness and quality before the products reach customers.
“It will be the first reliable test that can tell you, ‘my meat is this old and this good,’” Wamsley said. “So for pet food, it will basically enable the pet food manufactures to know the meat ingredients they’re getting from this company are actually … good quality.”
Wamsley said the company will use the prize money to attend global pet food conferences to get familiar with food regulations outside of the United States and to further research. Along with the prize money, Wamsley said the summit is especially helpful in preparing early entrepreneurs like him for bigger pitches.
“When it comes to the angel investors, which are the people who are really prominent in bringing the company to life, having good feedback and low-risk practice (pitching) is really really big,” he said. “That’s what these little startup summits and pitches are all about, is getting you prepared to pitch to the multimillion dollar investors.”
One-stop resource shop
Along with the competition, Pashos said the summit also included a showcase area where competitors could find resources, like with the university’s Small Business Development Center, for building and sustaining their companies.
“It was supposed to be an opportunity to highlight some of the really amazing and unique resources that Mississippi has as well,” Pashos said.
Building a successful startup, especially as a student entrepreneur, can be difficult without the right connections and resources. But when all of those connections and resources are centralized at the E-Center, it’s easier for those entrepreneurs to find support, Pashos said.
“When we put them in a setting like this, there are opportunities like that to grow relationships, to grow business partners, to get their business partners,” he said. “What we have is an opportunity where people who are starting businesses and who are coming from out of state are coming here, and they’re seeing that.”
Looking toward the next summit, Pashos said he wants to take it from the largest business plan competition in the state to one of the largest in the country, bringing in more businesses to participate and raising the stakes to include investment prizes.
“We want this to be a one-stop shop of an introduction into everything that we could offer from Mississippi – really highlight those resources,” he said. “… We want to grow this to be something that everybody can be proud of and come here and be a part of, so if you want to be a part of it, contact us. Let’s do this together and build even better for next year.”
McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.
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