A Washington University graduate student debuted his idea for a business at the Rice University Business Plan Competition last weekend.

Executive MBA student Stanislav Samarin initiated his plan, PulmoCAD, with a business partner in June 2010. The business will offer software that will be used in conjunction with scans to make lung cancer diagnosis less invasive for patients.

Samarin says that this sort of medical technology is necessary because lung cancer is so common and fatal.

The business aims to make diagnosing lung cancer easier and reduce the number of false positive diagnoses.

The annual competition brings students from top-ranked graduate-level business programs together to pitch their startups to business experts.

Although PulmoCAD did not make it to the semifinals, the team achieved third place in the competition’s Shark Tank round and won $600.

This is not PulmoCad’s first competition experience. The business won $20,000 in the Olin Cup competition this year, and Samarin hopes to raise more seed money to get his business rolling.

Although PulmoCad has already conducted some tests that show that the technology is effective, it must undergo further testing before it can go through the FDA approval process.

Samarin hopes that the product will be ready for FDA approval in about a year, but says that the business needs additional funding of approximately $300,000 to get to that point.

He says the company is applying for research and business grants to raise the funds.

Of the approximately 500 teams that applied to participate in the competition, 42—from schools ranging from Johns Hopkins University to Northwestern University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—were chosen to compete at Rice.

“I must say this is an incredible experience. It is a very competitive event; there were more than 500 submissions. Pre-selection is very strict,” Samarin said.

Though many schools send teams to the competition every year, Samarin was unable to find any Washington University alumni who had ever participated in the competition.

He said the competition was a valuable experience, that it helped the company to network with medical technology professionals and taught him how to tailor his business plan to a given set of specifications.

“For any competition you participate in you learn a lot from the professionals,” Samarin said. “You have to rethink the approaches you are taking; it is really difficult in startup world where companies change strategies very often. It is really a valuable experience.”