Diagnostic for All Wins Entrepreneurship Competition

Diagnostic for All (DFA), a startup from Harvard University that I wrote about recently, won the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition last night. DFA, which aims to develop cheap paper diagnostic tools for impoverished countries, differed from most of the competition because it is a not-for-profit. The coinventors of the paper test, George Whitesides and Hayat Sindi, say that it could be used to diagnose, for example, drug-induced liver damage, a major problem that often goes undetected in the developing world. Apparently, their business plan convinced the judges that it is a worthwhile, substantive venture.

The $10,000 Audience Prize went to Covalent Solar, a team that is working on more-efficient thin-film concentrator photovoltaic modules.