The Institute for the Integration of Management and Engineering (TIIME) at CWRU has announced seven semifinalists for the first-ever bioscience track of the Case-Weatherhead Business Launch Competition. The new bioscience business launch track will award up to $50,000 for the first-place winner and up to $20,000 to the second- and third-place finishers.

"The competition is the first business plan dedicated exclusively to bioscience companies," said Jeffrey T. Glass, co-director of TIIME and Joseph F. Toot Professor of Engineering at the Case School of Engineering. Aside from winning start-up funds, bioscience track winners will receive:

• The opportunity to present a full business plan to a distinguished panel of early-stage venture capitalists
• Mentoring from successful venture capitalists and entrepreneurs
• Business development and relocation assistance from BioEnterprise
• One year of free space in the BioEnterprise incubator
• Introductions to key people in the entrepreneurial community
• Feedback on the concept from entrepreneurial experts/practitioners
• The opportunity to meet others in order to round up a comprehensive start-up team
• One free year of membership in the Greater Cleveland Growth Association

The competition requires that companies meet specific criteria to be eligible, including having potential revenue of $100 million; having a business concept involving the biosciences, such as biotechnology, biomedical engineering, medical devices and pharmaceuticals; and having not received outside professional funding.

Semifinalists include:

• Gene-Ject LLC, which develops and commercializes micro-injection technology for genetic manipulation
• ValveXchange Inc., which develops an artificial heart valve to avoid the need for cardiac bypass surgery during valve replacement
• Zalen LLC, wh ich develops a product that combines a variety of tomography images to display an oncology image
• Interventional Imaging Inc., which provides tiny magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) coils that are inserted into coronary arteries to obtain images of vessel walls
• Kim Laboratories Inc., which will provide salmonella detection kits to food and meat processing facilities and hospitals
• Osteoplastics Corp., which develops technology to produce patient-specific cranial implant plates using three-dimensional CT scans
• NovoMark Technologies LLP, which attempts to improve crops in which extensive genomic resources are unlikely to be available in the future by understanding the structure and function of certain genes Sponsors of the competition include BioEnterprise Corp., The National Science Foundation and the Cleveland-area Council of Small Enterprises (COSE).