Wolf Greenfield Congratulates WPI Venture Forum's Five-Minute Pitch Contest Winners

WORCESTER, MA--(Marketwire - Jun 28, 2011) - Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks, P.C., congratulates WPI Venture Forum's Five-Minute Pitch Contest winner Factor Biosciences and runners-up Arctic Sand and Axena Technologies. All three were mentored by technology experts at Wolf Greenfield, a Boston intellectual property law firm and co-sponsor of the contest.

Winners were selected separately by a panel of industry experts and the audience. Each contestant worked with a mentor.

"This year was the inaugural year for the mentoring program. We received positive feedback from essentially all our contestants. They felt that the mentors had great suggestions to help them prepare for the pitch," said Dan Young, Ph.D., a technology specialist with Wolf Greenfield and co-organizer and moderator of the contest.

Factor Bioscience, which is developing new technology that turns skin cells into reprogrammed stem cells, was mentored by O. Tobias Brambrink, Ph.D., a technology specialist in Wolf Greenfield's biotechnology practice. The team took first prizes from both the judges and audience.

"Mark Scott, their chief science officer, did a fantastic job in condensing a complex topic into five high-impact minutes," Brambrink said.

Arctic Sand, mentored by Wolf Greenfield lawyer and shareholder Edmund J. Walsh, took the second-place audience choice. It is a fabless semiconductor company offering power converter chips.

Axena Technologies, which offers a product for combating healthcare-associated infections, took the third-place audience award. Wolf Greenfield shareholder Patrick R.H. Waller, Ph.D., was the mentor.

Wolf Greenfield, the largest law firm in New England devoted exclusively to intellectual property law, serves companies that make everything from pharmaceuticals to software to electronics to snowboards, as well as representing academic research centers. The firm counsels clients in the areas of patents, trademarks, copyrights, designs, trade secrets, and related licensing and litigation. Web: www.wolfgreenfield.com.