Increasing Disease Diagnosis with BioAnalytics

When Lucas Smith and Michael Willard were randomly selected to be roommates their freshman year in college, Michael states there was “immediately evidence that we were kindred spirits.” With one of their similarities being they both wanted to go into entrepreneurship, the two stayed in touch after graduation in the hopes of one day creating a business together. Sharing the perfect mixture of knowledge in business, public relations, and science, Lucas and Michael decided to create BioAnalytics.

Michael states, “BioAnalytics has developed to be a broadly applicable technology which reduces immunoassay complexity and cross reactivity to provide tests with the potential for faster turnaround times, fewer steps, decreased technician time requirement, less variability, higher sensitivity, and increased capacity for multiplexing.” Ultimately, BioAnalytics hopes to apply this in the medical field where this test can help increase the speed of disease diagnosis.

Currently, the BioAnalytics team is working on the completion of their first NSF SBIR grant. The SBIR grant which the team describes as “truly one of the best things that the government does to advance emerging technologies.” In July, the team will be applying to Phase II SBIR, while continuing to utilize university resources like EntepriseWorks, TEC, and most importantly, the access to shared labs across the campus to carry on enhancing their platform.

The team is also participating in I-Corps which is a program that teaches university entrepreneurs how to identify product opportunities and provides entrepreneur opportunity training. The team states this is a great, “for the beginning stages of business development, as it requires you to reach out to industry and validate/hone your entrance strategy.”

BioAnalytics mission is to have this research be beneficial to the medical field, where this data will be able to do some unimaginable things for disease diagnosis.

In the next 10 years, BioAnalytics hopes to “have our technology utilized ubiquitously across the lab and medical markets where it can have an immense impact in allowing more tests to be done in tandem, and in less time than it takes to run a single test presently.”

In a little over two years, the BioAnalytics team has made huge steps in getting their start-up off the ground. However, as the team states, entrepreneurship is an
“evolutionary process.”