Here’s Danny Tan, someone with whom I worked on a business plan with during my final year at Penn, featured in an article in The Business Times Singapore:
Winning with a strategy for commercialisation
BY DANNY TAN, Founder of NeuroMOD
FACING off against 500 other teams in an international competition was no mean feat, but emerging champion was something that I did not expect.
I was part of a team of Singaporeans who competed in the prestigious Intel+UC Berkeley Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge 2008. The competition, hosted by the Haas School of Business at the University of California, had a judging panel comprising more than 30 Silicon Valley-based investors, including representatives from Intel Capital, the giant chipmaker’s venture capital arm.
I founded the winning team, NeuroMOD Technologies, when still an undergraduate at the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) School of Design and Environment. The firm is a development stage company that designs, develops, manufactures and markets implantable medical devices for patients suffering from neurological disorders such as epilepsy.
It was selected to represent Singapore and NUS at the Intel+UC Berkeley Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge after impressing judges at Start-up@Singapore 2008, a national business plan competition organised by the NUS Entrepreneurship Society and supported by NUS Enterprise.
At the international competition, we locked horns with national winners from various countries including the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Russia, France, Brazil, India and China.
The business idea for NeuroMOD Technologies was first conceived in late 2006 during my year-long work-cum-study stint at the NUS Overseas Colleges (NOC) programme in Bio Valley, Philadelphia. As part of this programme, I was doing a full-time internship in an early-stage venture fund while taking technology management and venture finance courses at the University of Pennsylvania.
Through the NOC programme, I met Karen Anne Moxon, a researcher at Drexel University who was facing difficulty in attracting commercial interest for her invention. She had developed an electrode that could chronically record precise neurological signals from patients, which can then be used for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes.
I was excited when tasked by my internship company to help Dr Moxon further develop her commercialisation plans, as I was impressed by her technology and its potential to improve the quality of life of epilepsy patients.
The team working on this project comprised Andrew Khair, then a PhD student in Dr Moxon’s laboratory, and Terence Chia, a fellow Singaporean who was pursuing his final year of undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Reaching out to epileptics
After a series of discussions with Dr Moxon, our team decided that the first application of the technology should be targeted at epilepsy, a disorder which affects more than 50 million people in the world today.
About 20 per cent of all epilepsy patients currently do not respond to any available treatments, and suffer from regular seizure attacks which affect their daily lives.
At the same time, developments in other treatment methods are expected to hit major roadblocks. Here was an opportunity to improve the quality of life of patients suffering from epilepsy, and fulfil an unmet medical need.
Since none of us had any experience in bringing a biomedical device to the market, we spent many hours trying to understand the highly regulated and complex biomedical device industry. We were fortunate to meet many experienced industry practitioners who were willing to guide us along.
The thing that surprised us the most was how supportive people can be when they see that you are fully committed to something meaningful. In fact, we found that there was almost no stigma attached to us being students when it came to seeking advice from our mentors.
As we felt that the competition was stiff, it came as quite a surprise when NeuroMOD was announced as the winner. I think what differentiated our business plan from those submitted by the other teams was that we had a well thought-out commercialisation strategy.
This was the result of extensive research to better understand the needs of customers, and also spending time to talk to industry experts about the best way to bring our invention to the market.
In short, we made sure that our business plan was robust and could stand up to scrutiny by the experienced judging panel and potential investors.
The prize money of US$25,000 that we won will be used to invest in the further development of the product. Following the competition, NeuroMOD has since received private funding, and is presently conducting animal studies for our device in the US.
While I am currently back in Singapore to further my education, my partner Andrew is working full-time to bring our technology to the next stage. If all goes well, we expect our first product to reach the market in four to five years’ time after undergoing additional tests and clinical studies.
The writer is a fresh graduate from the 2008 class of the NUS School of Design and Environment.
This article was first published in The Business Times on February 09, 2009.
I was really proud to see Danny featured in the Business Times. Although I was mentioned in the article, it didn’t feel deserved as I was unable to play the more active role that I had initially envisioned for myself when I first joined the team. Danny did all of the heavy-lifting for the business plan and I was just happy to have been along on the ride, building a faulty 3-statement model and neglecting to build in more assumptions about working capital and the long approval processes in the medical device industry. We had a good run with the first iteration of our business plan – making the finals of the Jungle magazine business plan competition (which, coincidentally, was held in the now-defunct Bear Stearns’ NY corporate office) and the semi-finals of StartUp@Singapore 2007. Unfortunately, we never won any of those competitions due to the skepticism surrounding the nascent and unproven technology at that point of time. It did, however, alert us to the strengths/weaknesses of our business plan and presentation skills.
The business plan was deemed to be premature when we first pitched it – one of the judges at the competition thought that the idea of wirelessly charging an implanted medical device was completely ludicrous, and suggested that we should have written the business plan about that technology instead. Thankfully, Danny never lost faith in the commercial potential of the product, and continued to work on it even while finishing his last year of school. He took the criticism, learnt from it and used it to fashion a bulletproof business plan which he brought all the way to 2nd place in Startup@Singapore 2008, and then to US$25,000 in California. Definitely a proud achievement for Danny, NOC, NUS and even Singapore. Shows you that hard work does pay off.
Oh, and as a final note, we know today that the concept of charging wirelessly using electromagnetic induction is no Blade Runner fantasy. In fact, it’s going to be on a soon-to-be ubiquitous communication device – the Palm Pre.
Tags: business plan, Business Times, entrepreneurship, epilepsy, Jungle magazine, medical device, NeuroMOD, NUS, Singapore
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