Allison Hubel was sitting in her office seven years ago, pondering how to improve the process to preserve cells used to treat cancer and other illnesses, when she found inspiration looking out her window.
"I said, well, how do trees survive Minnesota winters?" said the University of Minnesota professor of mechanical engineering.
The answer is a combination of molecules that the tree expresses to keep its cell safe. Over the years, she's received more than $2 million in federal grants to test and prove her hypothesis that the same method can also be used to stabilize biological cells when they are frozen at subzero temperatures.
Her small startup, BlueCube Bio, which provides solution kits that manufacturers can use to preserve therapeutic cells, was named the grand prize winner of the Minnesota Cup on Tuesday evening. The reward: an additional $50,000.
The Minnesota Cup is the state's highest-profile competition for startups. Now in its 16th year, it's a public-private partnership that is run though the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. Division winners in nine categories, which each received $30,000, made a final pitch before a panel of judges to vie for the top prize.
Scott Litman, a co-founder of the Minnesota Cup and one of the judges, said the competition was particularly fierce this year, with the winner coming down to just two votes.
"This year more than any other the ideas and ingenuity were focused on how to change the world and improve the society around us," he said at the event, which usually attracts a live audience of hundreds of people, but which was scaled back this year and streamed online because of the pandemic.
The runner-up, which received an additional $20,000, was CounterFlow Technologies, which offers a new spraying technology that can work with thicker liquids and reduces energy and water usage.