A carbon-nanotube prosthetic-skin project earned a university spin-off company a spot on a reality TV show, plus $60,000 worth of venture capital and professional services. Smart Skin, a University of New Brunswick (UNB), Canada-based start-up company, took the Young Entrepreneur Prize and the Viewer’s Choice Award in the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation’s Breakthru business plan competition, a province-wide competition to pinpoint the region’s most promising entrepreneurs.
More than 7,000 people voted for Smart Skin in the contest, landing the company a spot on the Canadian Broadcast Company (CBC) reality show, Dragon’s Den. According to CBC, on the show, the company will pitch its business plan and its prosthetic skin to a panel of five “ruthless and mighty” business moguls, who will choose one contestant’s offering to finance with their own investment money.
According to the New Brunswickan newspaper, Kumaran Thillainadarajah, a fourth-year undergraduate student in computer engineering, heads the company, which is developing a skin for prosthetic limbs that is based on the unique properties of carbon nanotubes.
“About 100,000 of these—an entire forest of nanotubes—would fit onto the head of a needle,” Thillainadarajah told the New Brunswickan. “They are a hundred times stronger than steel, and at the same time, they are flexible and more importantly, pressure-sensitive.”
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