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SteriCoat, an early stage company developing an antimicrobial coating for medical devices, this week won a new innovation prize — $250,000 of seed financing from the first annual DFJ East Coast Venture Challenge at the Columbia Business School.

Two of the founders of Stericoat are Joel Moxley and Christopher Loose, who both majored in chemical engineering while undergraduates at Princeton.

Last year SteriCoat captured the $100,000 prize in an innovation competition sponsored by MIT, where Loose and Moxley recently earned their doctorates in chemical engineering. And earlier this year SteriCoat won the the Life Sciences category of a business plan competition at Rice.

You can listen to Loose and Moxley talk about their vision for SteriCoat on this podcast (Episode 95) from the Businessmakers Radio Show. Also of interest: Moxley is one of the researchers who recently reported in Science they have engineered a yeast that promises to make ethanol production faster and more efficient. Loose is the lead author of a recent paper in the journal Nature on research that may lead to a new generation of customized microbe-killing medicines.

Photo: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

(Christopher Loose, left, with Joel Moxley)