JMSB PhD Student Wins 2012 Medtech Excellence Scholarship

Ehsan Derayati, a PhD student at Concordia's John Molson School of Business was part of a multidisciplinary team that won the 2012 Medtech Challenge Excellence Scholarship award for their project entitled “Low cost microchip for point of care high sensitive assays.”

The Medtech Challenge was created to engage students interested in medical technology entrepreneurship. It offers them the opportunity to present and discuss their ideas, and to receive feedback from industry experts and other entrepreneurs.  The event is organized annually by Campus des technologies de la santé (CTS) and Mitacs, with the support of the Ministry of Finance and Economy (MFE) and legal firms, Fasken Martineau and Gascon & Associates. Together, they contribute cash and gifts-in-kind totalling $21,000 in value, to be used by the winners for further product development.

The wining team’s project focused on the design, manufacturing, business development and marketing of a low-cost chip used for rapid diagnosis of differential disease states. In addition to the health sector, the technology they developed has applications in the food and environmental sectors. Derayati’s collaborators were Roozbeh Safavieh and Tohid Fatanat Didar, who are PhD students at McGill University’s Department of Biomedical Engineering and Babak Safavie, a student at INRS-EMT.  “This was one of the best team experiences I’ve ever had in my life,” says Derayati, who was responsible for the business-related aspects of the project.

Derayati says that the team’s journey to victory began with the innovative design of a great product. “It begins with the quality of the offering,” he says. “The judges couldn’t help but be wowed by it.” The design of the chip is such that it can be manufactured at a relatively low cost. “We estimate that due to the simplicity of the chip’s design, when compared to existing products, the cost of production is about a third of the normal cost.”

Scholarship in hand, the team has entered the next stage of development, building relationships with various research labs and potential investors to develop the chip from its prototype phase.