MIT $100K Competition Winner: Diagnostics-for-All

The winning team: Krishna Yeshwant, Roozbeh Ghaffari, Hayat Sindi, Carol Waghorne, Jon Puz, and Gilbert Tang. Photo was supplied by MIT to the Boston Globe. Photo credit: Jeremy Gilbert

Yesterday's Globe brought us the news that a heartwarming non-profit won this year's MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. This generation of young entrepreneurs determined to do good warms my jaded, clogged arteries. Here's the Xconomy take as well.

According to the Globe, Diagnostics-For-All (DFA) seeks to deliver affordable point-of-care diagnostic solutions to the global medical community; based on patent-pending technology developed in chemist George Whitesides’ laboratory at Harvard, DFA’s offering will serve as a platform for simple, portable, low-cost, and easy-to-dispose diagnostic tools for developing countries. According to a press release: Field clinicians have applauded DFA for its efforts to date in developing rapid and accurate diagnostic tools for liver, kidney, and metabolic diseases.

This marks the second big win for the fledgling organization, which took home the top prize in the social enterprise track of the Harvard Business School annual Business Plan Contest in late April. That award came with a $10,000 check.

For the first time ever at the MIT $100K competition, the audience got to pick a winner. That $10,000 prize went to Covalent Solar, whose product uses an MIT-invented solar concentrator photovoltaic technology, based on the redirection of light using dyes, which is simpler and less expensive than existing methods.