Clodico presenting this morning at “2014 $1M Global Action Challenge”
By Tom Ballard, Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurial Initiatives, Pershing Yoakley & Associates, P.C.
It’s show time at 9 a.m. CST today when Oak Ridge start-up Clodico and five other finalists compete in this year’s “2014 $1M Global Action Challenge” in Nashville.
The competition is billed as an “investment opportunity to identify breakthrough prototypes, technologies or early stage ventures that hold promise for transformative impact on health and food and are scalable business enterprises. “
It officially launches the third annual “Global Action Summit Nashville” which features experts in the areas of food, health and prosperity. Keynote speakers include Fareed Zakaria (CNN), Fred Smith (FedEx), and Lucian Tarnowski (BraveNewTalent). In addition, two executives from PYA Analytics, LLC – Brian Worley, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), and Edmon Begoli, Chief Technology Officer – will be participating on panels this afternoon and tomorrow.
“There were about 100 original applications, and 25 made it to the semi-finals,” Joy Fisher, Clodico’s President and CEO, told us. In addition to her company, the other finalists presenting this morning are:
- TreatSpace, a Pittsburgh-based company with “software that connects patients, providers, and practices to optimize patient engagement, clinical collaboration and referral management.”
- OnRamp BioInformatics, a San Diego-based company that develops “complete BioInformatic solutions for High Throughput Genomics Analysis that are optimized for scale-out computational analysis and storage, enabling pharma, clinicians, researchers, sequence service providers and biotech professionals to focus on advancing health and medicine, rather than IT system complexity.”
- Talariant, a company that is creating “safe, effective, and efficient alternatives to outdated practices where cost and wastefulness have been overlooked.”
- Thermofield.
- VibroniX, an Indiana-based company that has developed a “patent-pending high-speed intravascular photoacoustic (IVPA) catheter system is a multimodal imaging system for atherosclerosis disease characterization.”
The winner will be announced at Tuesday night’s closing banquet.
As noted in previous teknovation.biz posts, Clodico was initially founded to develop and market a new line of environmentally-friendly disinfectants that quickly kill the bacteria and viruses plaguing hospitals. They include both clostridium difficile (C. diff) spores, a cause of deadly gastrointestinal illnesses, and Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a dreaded strain of staph bacteria.
“We had to prove that we had a 99.9999 percent kill rate for C.diff in one minute,” Fisher told us in a subsequent post, emphasizing the four decimal points. The test results came back at 99.99 percent.
Clodico continues to pursue that goal but has also made the proverbial pivot to a shorter-term, revenue-generating opportunity.
