Media Releases

Rotman team wins international entrepreneurship competition

May 22, 2013

TORONTO, ON – A team from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toronto’s Rot­man School of Man­age­ment has won the inau­gur­al event of the MBA World Tro­phy held in Dublin over the past week­end. The event brought entre­pre­neurs from 17 dif­fer­ent uni­ver­si­ties around the world to com­pete against each oth­er with their start-up busi­ness­es in front of ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists and oth­er busi­ness lead­ers.

Jason Mitakidis, MBA’14, Kate Root­man, MBA’14, and Eliz­a­beth Chak, MBA’15, who are stu­dents in the Rot­man School’s Morn­ing and Evening MBA pro­grams, won the top prize for best busi­ness for Cycli­ca Inc, a life sci­ences tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny lever­ag­ing big data to devel­op new med­i­cines, more cheap­ly. Their start-up was select­ed to rep­re­sent the Rot­man School at the event by the Rot­man Entre­pre­neur­ship & Ven­ture Cap­i­tal Asso­ci­a­tion. The Association’s out­go­ing pres­i­dent, Chris Siemie­ni­uch, MBA’13, also attend­ed the event.

“We are very excit­ed to have been cho­sen as the win­ners of the MBA World Tro­phy by such a dis­tin­guished judg­ing pan­el from the glob­al VC and entre­pre­neur­ship com­mu­ni­ty! We are also thank­ful to the Rot­man School of Man­age­ment and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to for their gen­er­ous sup­port in devel­op­ing Cycli­ca as a busi­ness. This sup­port has includ­ed men­tor­ship and angel invest­ments from fac­ul­ty mem­bers and Dean Roger Mar­tin,” says Jason Mitakidis, who is Founder & CEO of Cycli­ca Inc.

Fur­ther infor­ma­tion on the MBA World Tro­phy is online at mbaworldtrophy.com.

Cycli­ca is a big data tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny that is devel­op­ing indexed, mul­ti-scale bio­log­i­cal data­bas­es and soft­ware for the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and biotech­nol­o­gy indus­tries. The com­pa­ny’s core tech­nol­o­gy is an inno­v­a­tive and pro­pri­etary data inte­gra­tion and drug test­ing plat­form – The Lig­and Explor­er™ Com­put­ing Envi­ron­ment – that is address­ing the ris­ing cost of R&D in drug dis­cov­ery and low reg­u­la­to­ry approval rates of pre-mar­ket phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and bio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal prod­ucts. For more infor­ma­tion, vis­it, cyclicarx.com.

The Rot­man School of Man­age­ment at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to is redesign­ing busi­ness edu­ca­tion for the 21st cen­tu­ry with a cur­ricu­lum based on Inte­gra­tive Think­ing. Locat­ed in the world’s most diverse city, the Rot­man School fos­ters a new way to think that enables the design of cre­ative busi­ness solu­tions. The School is cur­rent­ly rais­ing $200 mil­lion to ensure Cana­da has the world-class busi­ness school it deserves. For more infor­ma­tion, vis­it www.rotman.utoronto.ca.

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For more infor­ma­tion, con­tact:

Ken McGuf­fin
Man­ag­er, Media Rela­tions
Rot­man School of Man­age­ment
Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to
Voice: 416.946.3818
mcguffin@rotman.utoronto.ca
Fol­low Rot­man on Twit­ter @rotmanschool
Watch Rot­man on You Tube: www.youtube.com/rotmanschool