From bioscience to business

Symons, who graduated from the Institute of Biotechnology in the University of Cambridge this summer, was selected from among the best of England and Northern Ireland’s engineering, scientific and technology students for the new fellowship.

The event was part of a two-day induction to prepare 18 Fellows for a six-month spell in the US. The selected candidates will study at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, based in Kansas and founded in the mid-1960s to promote entrepreneurship.

They will also visit Stanford and Harvard, completing their time with a three-month placement at a top US firm.

The aim of the scheme is to help students develop their business ideas, commercial awareness, and contacts through mixing with leading scholars, policy leaders, innovative researchers and founders of companies.

Symons’ plan is to produce a non-stick coating for coronary stents used in angioplasty. Cardiovascular disease kills well over 2000 people a day in the US alone and currently angioplasty – the intervention used to prevent it – fails in 6 percent of patients.

A non-stick coating could prevent the protein deposits that can currently build up around the wire-mesh stent and block the flow of blood.

Commenting on the induction event, Gerhard Symons said: “I am even more determined than ever to make my business concept a success. It has been an exciting process to mature my business idea and look at how it would operate in the UK and US markets and the differences between the two. It has also been a great opportunity to meet the other Fellows and entrepreneurs from a range of sectors and learn from their experiences.”

The fellowship has been designed by the National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship (NCGE) together with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

Ian Robertson, Chief Executive of the NCGE, said: “Through developing their business ideas the Fellows have begun to see the challenges and obstacles they will face over the next few months and how to overcome them.”