Yucatecan Ethan Atlan Sabido, 20 years old, won the StartUp Texas SBIR/STTR Innovation Competition 2024. As a prize, he obtained USD 40,000 in financing for his company: AccuCell Biotechnology.
Ethan is a student in the fifth semester of the first-generation Bachelor’s Degree in Biotechnology at the Anáhuac Mayab University.
His interest in this science arose years ago, when he was a child since his grandfather was a neurosurgeon and his approach to technology was recurrent.
He remembers that one summer, when he was 13 or 14 years old, he discovered a video on genetic engineering, which opened his mind to understand that, instead of trying to solve an existing problem, we should look for a way to prevent it.
“You don’t have to wait for a tumor in the head to operate on it if you can resolve it sooner with other techniques,” says Ethan.
For the young student, the idea of connecting with another country was never far away, so after his teacher Yoselín Ávila Lizárraga noticed his passion for technology in the space industry and biotechnological entrepreneurship, they ventured to knock on the doors necessary to achieve it.
Ethan says the support from his school is invaluable. He was able to complete school issues such as exams and homework while away, during the time he needed to develop his project.
He traveled alone to the competition in the United States, where he met the entire network of people he had only seen online in the pre-contest phases, in Texas there were eight intensive weeks in the summer to build his presentation, studying the competition and taking advantage of their coaches.
“It was a moment of pressure, but the presentation day was extraordinary, I was focused on waiting for them to call me.”
There was nothing left to do but wait for the deliberation, from six places the winners would be named. He says that since his name did not appear before the top three, he felt happy to be among them, but when he realized that he took the first place, he could not believe it.
Ethan’s company, AccuCell Biotechnology, works with NASA technology, and they have granted him licenses to sell their product.
In the company, they grow human cells from different organs on small glass chips, on which all preclinical tests for a new drug or to test a new therapy can be carried out, without harming animals.
In addition, they obtain closer and more precise results by working directly on human cells.
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