NEWS

From the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Southern Research to recent startups, Birmingham is already on the forefront of the battle against breast cancer in many respects. “If you look at breast cancer cases, there are almost 300,000 cases a year. So building that body of knowledge is great, but we have to do something about taking that research, pulling out from the labs and bringing it to life, and that’s where the entrepreneurial mindset comes in: how do you take these ideas that would otherwise die in labs, how do you put them into labs and bring them to life so that it can applied? That’s what we need more of – we need the entrepreneurial mindset, and we need more funding,” said Dr. Budhwani, CEO-Scientist of CerFlux.

The Economic Development Partnership of Alabama named the winners for its 2018 EDPA Innovation Awards at the 2018 imerge event. Startup Executive of the Year, Dr. Karim Budhwani, is CEO of CerFlux Personalized Medicine, which aims to reduce the pain, reduce the discomfort and reduce the cost of cancer treatment.

My goals include #CrushCancer, expand health care access, and reduce incorrect claims payments. First, through CerFlux, we want to equip patients and physicians with additional data about the most efficient treatment for each individual’s tumor,” Johnson said.

Did you make it to imerge? A signature event of Birmingham’s recent Innovation Week and hosted by the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama (EDPA), imerge recognized movers and shakers in Alabama’s start-up business scene.