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Mar 13, 2020

Tuck Students Compete in Health Care Competition

By Kathy Cazares T’21

On February 22, 2020, Reid Hansen T’21, Alex Ji T’21, Rui Zhang T’21, Dave Praharaj T’21, and I hit the road to compete in our casing debut at the Yale Health Care Competition (YHCC).

This competition brings together students from multidisciplinary backgrounds, industry businesses, and academic experts to Yale SOM for a day of innovation and collaboration addressing difficult and exciting developments in the health care sector. Twenty-five teams were invited to participate.

The theme of this year’s case was the "Therapeutic approach of a novel gene editing therapy.” We had one week to provide a feasible and timely pathway to commercialization for a research lab's novel CRISPR based gene editing tool. Our research included industry expert interviews, market reports, and scientific publications. We created models for pricing and frameworks applying our classroom and professional knowledge to the financial and market realities of health care businesses. In addition, we created a high level long term strategy to help the company map its path to a take their research based gene editing tool to market keeping in mind the ecosystem and specifics unique to our product.

For the preliminary round, teams were randomized to compete in five different pools. We presented our findings over 15 minutes followed by 5 minutes of Q&A by our judges. We shared our findings on market size, competition, pricing, licensing, and long-term company strategy. One of the judges noted we brought up important concepts critical for success in our talk not touched upon in other presentations. It a fun and valuable day that also included networking with participants and participating organizations and we plan to return again next year.