News Detail
Tepper MBAs Take Top Honors at Global Moot Corp®
Contact: Deb Magness (412-268-8678)
Release Date: May 06, 2008
Tepper School Team Takes Top Honors at Global Moot Corp® Competition
Fifth Award at Leading Venture Contest Makes Carnegie Mellon Winningest School
PITTSBURGH – For the fifth time, a team of students from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon has landed the top prize this past weekend at leading business plan competition Moot Corp®. This year’s winning venture business – NeuroBank – has developed a breakthrough proprietary technology to extract and preserve adult neural stem cells. Tepper beat out 37 other teams from leading business schools and universities worldwide, also earning the title as the winningest school since the contest’s founding.
The winning team consisted of Tepper MBA candidate Raymond Sekula, M. D., and Sasha Bakhru, a Ph.D. candidate at the Carnegie Mellon College of Engineering. The team was advised by S. Thomas Emerson, David T. and Lindsay J. Morgenthaler Professor of Entrepreneurship.
NeuroBank has developed cutting-edge technology to harvest, isolate, expand and store neurologic stem cells from cerebrospinal fluid, a clear bodily fluid around and inside the brain. NeuroBank’s technology allows minimally invasive extraction, isolation, expansion and cryopreservation of these stem cells and supports efforts to expand their use in developing treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, stroke or traumatic brain injury, among others. In addition, the technology will allow patients to store healthy neural stem cells today to receive cutting-edge treatments for diseases they might develop later in life.
As the winner of this year’s Moot Corp® contest, NeuroBank will receive a generous prize package valued at $100,000, including $25,000 in cash; one year of strategic business consulting and mentoring; prosecution of the first American patent by Ropes & Gray; and consulting from the McCombs School of Business entrepreneurship faculty. Team members will also open the NASDAQ Stock Market on August 15th in New York City. NeuroBank also recently won third place in the Rice University Business Plan Competition, co-sponsored by Fortune Small Business magazine.
Now in its 25th year, Moot Corp® is considered to be the “Super Bowl” of business plan competitions and is held at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. In the last five years alone, the Tepper School has achieved three first-place and one second-place finishes.
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About the Tepper School of Business: Founded in 1949, the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon (www.tepper.cmu.edu) is a pioneer in the field of management science and analytical decision-making. The school’s notable contributions to the intellectual community include six Nobel laureates and a consistent presence in the top tier of business school rankings. The Wall Street Journal recently ranked the Tepper School as the fifth-best business school in the United States.
