The University of Delaware Hen Hatch 2016 student track winning team JADE Biotech won a $10,000 federal grant in November as part of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) competition, “$100,000 for Start a Substance Use Disorders (SUD) Startup.”

“We were thrilled when we heard that we were one of 10 teams to win the NIDA Startup Challenge,” said John Lowman, co-founder of JADE Biotech. “It’s amazing validation that the thought-leaders at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) see how our project could help reduce the risk of drug abuse in hospitals nationwide.”

JADE Biotech is a company with the mission of improving the efficiency and security of narcotic waste disposal in hospitals. To do so, they have developed The WasteWell, a device that analyzes the concentration and volume of wasted narcotics while deactivating and securing the wasted volume. This information is then automatically synced into the hospital’s inventory database.

Along with Lowman, the JADE Biotech team was co-founded by fellow UD engineering students Dan Charytonowicz, Elizabeth Soulas and Allison Lisberg, all from the Class of 2016. Lowman, Charytonowicz and Soulas graduated with Honors degrees. This team participated and placed first for students in Hen Hatch in the spring of 2016, winning $16,800.

Hen Hatch is the University’s premier startup funding competition, hosted by UD’s Horn Program in Entrepreneurship.

“If it wasn’t for the mentorship and financial resources we won through Hen Hatch, there’s no way we would have been able to commit to working on JADE full-time after graduation,” Lowman said.

The $10,000 grant that the company won from NIDA will be used to develop a minimum viable proof (MVP) to gather customer feedback, which will allow JADE Biotech to validate their product and further advance their company.

“This grant gives us a really strong opportunity to develop a proof-of-concept system for analyzing narcotic solutions, opening the door for full prototype development sooner than we expected,” Lowman said.

NIDA awarded ten different teams $10,000 each from the $100,000 prize pool. “$100,000 for Start a SUD Startup” is the first competition for biomedical scientists whose goal is to support research ideas that can be developed into a biotech startup.

Registration for Hen Hatch 2017 is open now through Jan. 16, 2017.

About the Horn Program in Entrepreneurship

The Horn Program in Entrepreneurship ignites imaginations and empowers world changers through educational offerings that emphasize experiential learning, evidence-based entrepreneurship and active engagement with entrepreneurs and other members of the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Through participation in Horn Program offerings, students gain the knowledge, skills, personal capacities, experiences, connections and access to resources needed to successfully manifest innovation and thrive in the rapidly changing world.