Brice Vallieres is No. 1 in New York’s Creative Core Emerging Business Competition
HARTFORD, Conn. – Brice Vallieres, ’09, finished first among 60 high school and college students in a contest promoting ideas for new products. For his creativity in coming up with a proposal for a lightweight portable air filtration device, Vallieres won $5,000 in New York’s Creative Core Emerging Business Competition.
The two major sponsors of the event were M&T Bank and New York Business Development Corp. Vallieres, 21, is from Utica, N.Y. and learned of the competition, which was held in Syracuse, from his father. Vallieres is majoring in biochemistry.
The impetus for the competition stemmed from the findings of the Essential New York Initiative, which is the Metropolitan Development Association’s strategic plan to transform a section of upstate New York into a knowledge-based economy. The group’s study found that the region was lagging in new business formation, patent growth, and venture capital investment.
Vallieres pitched his idea to investors, lawyers and entrepreneurs. Essentially, his idea for the product, which he calls “Oxy-Filter,” involves creating a lightweight and portable medical device that exploits the nature of air by using filters to concentrate the oxygen. The oxygen is concentrated by absorbing nitrogen through the filters.
The product would make it possible for the 32 million people in this country suffering from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases, such as emphysema, to move about freely and travel at will. Currently, large, heavy oxygen tanks are restricted in such places as airplanes. Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease is the fourth leading cause of death in the United States.
Although it was not necessary for Vallieres to design a prototype, he said that ideally, his lightweight device would be no larger than a cigarette box. Vallieres, whose grandfather suffered from emphysema, said he had been conceptualizing his idea for about a year. He said he would use the summer to explore opportunities to see if his idea could be developed.