MedTech Actuator Origin Semi-Finals
Yesterday night, despite a health scare, my business partner Oliver Cucanic and I prepared for war, participating in the MedTech Actuator Origin Semi-Finals for our idea OncoSure.
We are proud and elated to have gotten to this point after a week of captivating conversations, intensive workshops pressure testing our ideas, rapid fire rounds (1-minute pitch where 2/3 of the groups were eliminated from the comp) and relentless late evenings curating our 3-minute pitch for the semi-finals.
Although we were not one of the lucky few to make it through to the finals, we have acquired invaluable life-long connections and an immense amount of knowledge regarding what it takes to make strides in this industry. While our journey has only just began, we look forward to assiduously moving our ideas forward.
Great work to those groups who pulled through to the final round. Particularly, AcuDent who gave a phenomenal pitch. And, of course to all those who participated, for having the courage, passion and fortitude to step into the colosseum.
Thank you to Buzz Palmer, Makenzie Thomas and all others involved in creating a start-up ecosystem designed to move innovation forward in Australia and around the world!
What a grandiose educational experience it has been. The race is not over. We love this game. Onto the next!
#medtech #startup #publicspeaker #studententrepreneurs
Note
The OncoSure project was started in September 2022 with the ambitious goal of providing direct-to-consumer cancer screening through a subscription service for at-home, non-invasive blood sample collection. We aimed to utilise existing FDA-approved non-invasive blood collection technology to enable convenient and regular risk screening for 50 different cancer types in the comfort of a patient's home. These predictions were to be made using high-throughput machine learning-assisted analysis of methylation patterns on DNA fragments shed by tumors into circulation.
In October 2022, our startup progressed through to the Semi-Final round of the MedTech Actuator Origin. This is Asia-Pacific’s MedTech Incubator and afforded us the opportunity to pressure test our business plan, develop our business acumen and liaise with experts in medical technology, artificial intelligence, commercialisation and intellectual property. However, after speaking to various key stakeholders and experts in the field, my co-founder and I decided to pause further work on this project while we focus on completing our research degrees.
