The Texas Tech Innovation Hub recently hosted this year's Red Raider Startup event, a competition where teams pitched their ideas for a chance to win a thousand dollars while networking and gaining valuable experience in the process.
Participants were split into teams and competed for one of two awards. The team that came up with the best idea related to agriculture earning recognition alongside the team that had the best overall pitch, with the latter also receiving a prize of one thousand dollars.
This year, that prize went to a team proposing a Lupus treatment centered on the PEGylation of a protein – a concept Jon McCord had been working on for years.
McCord is a PhD candidate at Texas Tech who has spent nearly a decade researching Lupus, even securing a patent on a protein now known as Dnase1L3.
“What I'm developing is sort of the only treatment that targets the root cause of this disease," McCord explained. "I think it’d be really nice to not just prevent the more severe aspects of lupus, like lupus nephritis — which can be deadly — but, it'd be really nice to have a treatment that kind of prevents this recurring cycle of flare-ups."
Lupus is an autoimmune disease that often results physical distress for patients and sometimes can even cause organ damage.
McCord told me that his treatment aims to tackle those issues head-on.
“The main thing I want to see is improved patient outcomes. I think what I have is the best path for that. Really, I honestly do believe in what we’ve developed,” McCord said. “I’ve met so many Lupus patients at this point that I really can't let this idea not have its best chance at making their outcomes better. Because yeah, the current treatment options are really not cutting it.”
Throughout the competition, McCord’s team focused on refining their pitch. The business students helped shape the presentation, while other PhD students contributed research to support the project.
“There were a lot of diverse backgrounds on my team," McCord said. "And I really wanted to play to everyone’s strengths.”
McCord explained how valuable advice was from the judges and mentors: “What the judges want to see is a really well-worked-out plan. The more preparation you do, the more successful you'll be.”
One of the judges, Dr. Cele Stone, an entrepreneur and agricultural innovator who works in the Davis College of Ag Sciences and Natural Resources, acknowledged that McCord’s pitch faced a challenge — revenue from a medical treatment like this could be years away.
“Anytime you're doing med tech, you're a long ways from revenue generation," Stone said. "And so there was a little bit of a conversation about who should be the winner because of that.”
She said it ultimately came down to the fact that McCord has patents and the initial trials have shown results. These two factors were exciting enough to give his idea the edge it needed.
Stone also complimented McCord on leadership skills, a compliment that she extended to the team with the best agricultural idea with an app called Green & Things, an app that could act as your own AI-powered gardening expert.
Lilly Herring is one of the co-founders of Green & Things. She called the app a “multi-vendor e-commerce marketplace platform”, meaning an app that connects users with pre-existing vendors that own specific plants.
“But we want to incorporate an AI into it,” Herring added. “So basically, our users will use this AI to find the kind of plants that fits their needs. Our target audience is amateur gardeners, people who are enthusiastic about growing but tend to kill their plants often because they don't know how to necessarily do that.”
Julian Alfaro, also co-founder of Green & Things, further explained their idea and how it benefits from the use of artificial intelligence.
“Imagine if you had no clue where to start with gardening,” Alfaro said. “We have an AI that could basically say, ‘Okay, this plant would work really well in your living space, and you could pair it with this pot and this soil and get started’, and we'll give you a care guide.”
Stone said it was their use of AI that moved the needle for her.
“Because my initial thought as just a Gen Xer who's just now really getting into AI was, oh my gosh, the amount of data they're going to have to have to put into this, like plant types, weather conditions. All of the different things you would have to take into account — soil types,” Stone said. “Then when they said ‘AI’ I was like, oh, okay, and that changed everything.”
Herring and Alfaro said that the next big step for Green & Things is entering the idea into the iLaunch competition, another Innovation Hub event that’ll take place in late November and awards larger prizes to the best ideas, the top reward being ten thousand dollars.
McCord said he’ll be entering his idea into the iLaunch competition as well.
For Green & Things, their current objective is improving a beta-model of their interface and AI assistant, which they refer to as an “MVP”, so they can have something tangible to pitch at iLaunch.
“Some errors here and there, but we want to really focus on improving that so we can have an accurate product base,” Herring said. “Right now we’re just scraping listings from like Home Depot. They’re not really ‘real’ quite yet, so we want to get things real and out there for now.”
Both founders echoed McCord’s message of events at the Innovation Hub like Red Raider Startup providing invaluable experience, especially with them both expecting to graduate this year.
“Red Raider Startup was more of a learning experience than I thought it would be,” Alfaro said.
Alfaro continued: “Whenever we went in, we planned to just pitch our idea, you know, get some money. But no, it taught us team building. It taught us how to manage a team, how to work with other experts in our field. It also really taught us to face our challenges head on. That’s what you have to do, specially because we pivoted multiple times throughout the process. It's like, 'Okay, this isn't working. Let's go ahead and face this head on and go through it with the easiest solution we can find.'”
Herring added that the event was a ‘priceless’ experience for new entrepreneurs.
“It was quite the experience for us. It was amazing,” Herring said. “They had the prize of $1,000 but I think the experience itself was just worth so much more than that.
