Wharton Leaders

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BPC winners typically focus on raising additional money, as PetPlan and Embrace did, not celebrating the cash that they receive with their victory. After all, a few thousand dollars doesn’t go far for a money-hungry startup. But for Ben Doranz’s company, Integral Molecular, which won in the BPC in 2001, the $25,000 prize money was a real boost.

“Our primary source of start-up funding was grants through places like the National Institutes of Health,” says Doranz, WG’01, who also has a doctorate in microbiology from Penn. “That money only funds the research and can’t be used for things like patents or marketing. So the $25,000 filled in the gap while we raised more money. It went quite far for us.”

Today, Integral Molecular is developing and selling drug-discovery tools for pharmaceutical researchers. The company began as the combination of two business plans that Doranz had entered into the Wharton BPC — one was called ProtoCell, and the other, ViraCore. The ProtoCell plan won, but ViraCore turned out to be easier to commercialize. Doranz ran into a legal pitfall with ProtoCell about a week after his win. While thumbing through a scientific journal, he came across news of a patent for a technology that closely resembled his.

“We got scooped,” he says. “It definitely put a bump in the road. I almost licensed the competing technology. Then a competing company started, and I almost joined them. But in the end, I decided to take a chance and start ViraCore.” He continued to work on distinguishing ProtoCell’s technology from the competing one and, once he did so, staked his legal claim to it. After that, it became Integral Molecular’s second product line.

Biotech firms like Integral Molecular need time to bring their products to market, and keeping a company alive while its technology matures typically requires pitching to outside investors. Like the founders of PetPlan and Embrace, Doranz found that his Wharton BPC win gave him credibility in those discussions. “You’ve been vetted in a sense,” he says. “It doesn’t get you a check from a VC, but it does give you an opportunity. It’s like an introduction from a colleague for a job. It’ll get you the interview but not the job.”

Today, Philadelphia-based Integral Molecular, which employs about 20 people, is selling the ViraCore technology and getting ready to launch the ProtoCell line. The company still depends on scientific grants to fund its operations. Doranz predicts that it will see its first significant sales this year and, by next year, should bring in more money through product sales than grants.

“If we hadn’t won the BPC, there’s a good chance that we never would’ve started,” he adds. “Winning definitely gives you the confidence to get going and validation that you’re doing something worthwhile.”

Unlike Doranz, Baruch Ben Dor already had the confidence to run a company when he won the Wharton BPC in 2004; he’d done so in his native Israel. What he didn’t know was whether he could start one from scratch.

He’d come to Penn as a visiting researcher, hoping that he might find a technology that would serve as foundation of a new firm. His doctorate in physics led him to the laboratory of Britton Chance, an emeritus Penn professor and pioneer in the field of biophysics. There, Ben Dor found what he sought. Chance’s lab had developed a means of using nearinfrared light to pinpoint brain bleeding. In theory, it could help physicians and paramedics diagnose brain injuries more quickly and thus speed treatment.

Thanks to his business experience, Ben Dor was able to write a draft of a business plan on his own. But when he heard about the Wharton BPC, he realized that it offered a way to polish his proposal. He decided to try to enlist the help of Wharton students. Soon, he met Sandeep Naik, WG’04, and Sammonoi Banerjee, WG’05. Naik and Banerjee reworked the plan, which proposed a company, called InfraScan, to develop handheld brain scanners. Naik and Sammonoi did the final presentation before the judges. Like other winners, the team got cash and a blue-ribbon endorsement, which helped in raising money. But Ben Dor says a greater benefit might have been the legal services that winners receive. “The attorney who we met was [Philadelphia lawyer] Steve Goodman,” he says. “He has been one of the most critical elements in building the company. At some of the most critical decision points, I don’t know if we would’ve survived if he hadn’t been there.”

Goodman, for example, smoothed the negotiations that enabled InfraScan to license the technology from Chance’s lab. When the talks turned thorny, Goodman’s long relationship with the lawyer across the table made the difference. “Steve had been the teacher of the attorney that represented the other side,” Ben Dor explains. Goodman, W’62, L’65, is a partner in the Philadelphia office of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius.

In the end, Naik and Banerjee elected not to join InfraScan, which is based in Philadelphia. Like many MBAs, they had school loans to repay and wanted a more certain future. Today, Naik works for Apax Partners, a privateequity firm, while Banerjee is a managerial consultant with McKinsey. They’ve stayed in touch with Ben Dor and help out occasionally on special projects.

InfraScan, for its part, has begun to sell its scanner in the developing world and hopes, by this summer, to receive regulatory approval to market it in the United States and Europe. It has already completed its U.S. clinical trials, which are mandated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and, over the winter, was preparing to make its application for final FDA certification. “Once we get our FDA approval, we’ll do a large round of funding,” Ben Dor says.

Looking back on the BPC, Ben Dor says that it forced him to grapple with just the sorts of issues that he has ended up confronting as an entrepreneur. “We’ve basically done what we laid out in the business plan,” he says. “It took longer than I thought it would — I thought we’d be able to do it in two years, and it took three — but I did it with half the money — $2.5 million, instead of $5 million.”