Congratulations are in order to MEM graduate students Bobby Chang and Halim Ayan for placing Second overall in the 2008 Baiada Business Plan Competition. Their project, InvitroPharm earned them the second place prize of $1000.

After taking a class in Biomedical Entrepreneurship, Chang and Ayan were tasked to write a business plan, and their concept was born. The students coined the company name InvitroPharm and together sought to develop and test a high-fidelity, high-throughput in vitro toxicology platform as a bridge between traditional in vitro and in vivo testing of drugs. Their technique fuses aspects of tissue engineering, solid freeform fabrication, and microfabrication technology to offer competitive advantages over available methods today. This methodology allows rational design, fabrication, and characterization of a microfluidic device to serve as a physiologically pertinent in vitro liver model for drug metabolism testing.