Cancer researchers win $25,000 in U. competition

Correction appended

With $40,000 in prize money at stake, researchers, graduate students and professors attempted to summarize years of research in three minutes Thursday night.

Twelve groups of contestants presented their innovative research and potential applications to a panel of four judges from venture capital firms around the country.

The competitors battled against an alarm clock and yellow cards waved in the air signaling that they were out of time. After an hour of deliberation, the winners were revealed.

The first-place winner, Stephanie Budijono GS, won $25,000 to continue research on a new method of treating and attacking small-cell lung cancer.

Chemical engineering professor Robert Prud’homme has advised Budijono over the past couple of years to create a product that may increase the survival rate of patients with small-cell lung cancer.

The main treatment that is currently used, called photodynamic cancer therapy, often kills both healthy cells and tumor cells. Budijono explained to the judges that more than $12 billion dollars could potentially be grossed from practical applications of this new technology, which would selectively attack tumor cells.

Budijono said that her group is almost finished with developing its product and has already attained a Princeton patent. She added that clinical trials are expected to begin in 2010.

The second-place winner, Stephen So, a postdoctorate fellow at the University who is advised by electrical engineering professor Gerard Wysocki, won $10,000 for a plastic-bottle-sized trace-gas monitor.

While most technologies using laser spectroscopic sensing are “too large for a swamp,” So argued that his group’s innovation would have multiple applications for environmental, medical and security monitoring.

“The United States is trying to be the leader in the world for the carbon credit and tax system, and most of the technology available now either costs too much or uses too much power,” So said.

He explained that his monitor’s potential medical applications may include the ability to detect asthma, certain cancers and diabetes through breathing tests. The monitor could also potentially replace “bomb-sniffing dogs” by detecting the chemicals in explosives.

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The third-place winner, Computer Science professor Vivek Pai, won $5,000 for his edge acceleration box for slow networks that would allow for 80 to 95 percent savings in internet bandwidth. It will be utilized in Intel’s One-Laptop-Per-Child project in Nigeria and Ghana. Pai’s innovation has also been named one of MIT’s top 10 emerging technologies in its technology review.

“It’s going to help computers and increase access to the internet in impoverished countries,” Omar Javed ’09, who was in the audience, said.

Other innovations that were presented included a machine that allows multiple people to be scanned at once inside an MRI scanner, which could be used to study brain responses to physical contact, and a protein design framework that may reduce the cost of HIV treatment and the effectiveness of fighting viruses.

Yue Yang ’09 said he was impressed by all of the presentations.

“It was interesting to see how technology and science at Princeton can have an impact on society and become viable products in the real world,” he noted.

This year’s innovation forum was hosted in part by the Princeton Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education and the Jumpstart New Jersey Angel Network. This year was the first in which monetary prizes were awarded.

Correction:

An earlier version of this article misquoted Yue Yang '09.