Success in international business plan competition
28 April 2009
The winners celebrate
Cambridge students have recorded success in an international business plan competition.
HivioSense, a business idea conceived by students from the Master's in Bioscience Enterprise programme, won the New Venture €1K competition run in the Netherlands. HivioSense is aiming to develop and commercialize a novel HIV detection system that can detect the presence of HIV in patient three weeks after infection. This will be a major advantage compared to current tests on the market, which can take up to three months to give an accurate result. HivioSense will allow individuals to modify their behavior at a earlier point to prevent the spread of HIV. Furthermore people are also more likely to trace and tell their partners to get tested for HIV if they receive a diagnosis within a few weeks.
The members of the HivioSense team are Matthias Havenaar, Razek Coussa, Carol Walton and Dr Nafees Malik, who were recently interviewed by BBC Radio Cambridgeshire about the potential of the test.