Student Spotlight: GSDM Student and Teammates Won Second Place in 2024 Boston University Innovate@BU’s New Venture Competition
GSDM student Alireza Eghdamian DMD 26 and his teammates won second place in the general track during this year’s Boston University’s Innovate@BU New Venture Competition, receiving a $10,000 prize.
The Innovate@BU New Venture Competition awards $72,000 in prizes to early-stage Boston University entrepreneurs to assist them in their transformation from pitch to product.
“[Winning] was an incredibly happy moment,” Eghdamian said.
Eghdamian worked with BU alum Caspian Chaharom CAS 23 and Harvard School of Dental Medicine students Cami Tussie and Anita Nasseri to create PerioSense, an affordable and accessible automated electronic dental periodontal probe that would significantly reduce the time and effort needed for regular screenings.
The team has been working on PerioSense for two years. With their winnings, Eghdamian said they can enter the next stage of the product by funding intellectual property (IP) protections and building a professionally made prototype.
“We have several prototypes that we built ourselves, but now we are able to build a professionally made prototype that we can actually use to test on real people,” he said. “So far, we’ve only been able to test on ourselves because it’s a handmade prototype. Once we get our IP protected and have our prototype ready, then we will probably be moving towards doing real trials on real patients.”
Before the competition, Eghdamian said the team focused on building several prototypes and conducting market research to determine how a product of this nature would be received by dentists. Currently, dentists screen for gum disease—an ailment that often results in worse outcomes the longer it is left untreated—through time-consuming regular screenings. According to Eghdamian, PerioSense will assist dentists in diagnosing gum diseases in earlier stages.
“A lot of gum disease goes unnoticed until it is in moderate or advanced stages,” Eghdamian said. “Our device automates this process to a great degree, and it basically cuts the time in half.”
Eghdamian said he encourages fellow GSDM classmates to seek out university resources, including Innovate@BU’s BUild Lab IDG Capital Student Innovation Center, if they have an innovative idea and need assistance bringing it to fruition. Without Innovate@BU, PerioSense would have never existed, said Eghdamian.
“I feel that the dental field is one of those fields where there’s a lot of room for innovation, [and] there’s a lot of room for little improvements that people can make and a lot of my classmates do have ideas,” Eghdamian said. “They just need to actually try to implement it and the university has a lot of resources to help people who don’t even know anything about this process to get started.”