Professor Guillermo Ameer’s Start-Up Wins Business Plan Competition

June 4, 2009

A McCormick startup recently won the Chicago Biomedical Consortium business plan competition.

VesselTek Biomedical, an innovative vascular products company started by Guillermo Ameer, associate professor of biomedical engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University, his former student Antonio Webb, and Melina Kibbe, assistant professor of surgery at the Feinberg School of Medicine, will receive a $10,000 prize for winning the annual competition, which invites graduate student teams from its three participant schools — Northwestern, University of Chicago, and University of Illinois at Chicago — to submit biomedically relevant business plans in order to compete for the grand prize. This year, six teams competed.

VesselTek Biomedical started a year ago after Ameer realized that the biocompatible coating that promotes the safety and success of vascular repairs that he developed in his lab would need outside funding and support if it were ever to make it to market.

Webb, VesselTek’s senior scientist/development engineer, became the company’s first employee, and last fall the company entered into the State of Illinois’s entrepreneurial innovation competition called Innovate Illinois. Though it was selected as one of the 12 finalists, the company ultimately didn’t win. When Webb presented at the CBC business plan competition, it was another chance to show investors what the company was made of.

“Tony Webb did an excellent job presenting,” Ameer says, “and winning this competition validates the company’s goals. When it comes to raising funds, we hope it will open doors.”

Ameer says a synthetic graft with biocompatible coating that would reduce thrombosis and could be on the market within three years. A drug-eluting version, making artificial graft procedures as successful as those using natural vessels, will follow within the next five years.

The Chicago Biomedical Consortium (CBC), launched in 2002, aims to stimulate collaboration among scientists at Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois at Chicago that will transform research at the frontiers of biomedicine. The Chicago Biomedical Consortium is supported by The Searle Funds at The Chicago Community Trust.