Founders: Caroline Crisafulli, 40; Wayne Poll, 50; Jodi Wolfe, 28
Date launched: January 2006
Startup capital: $200,000 in founders' funds and business-plan prize money, plus $700,000 in angel funding
School: The Ohio State University
Product or service: A disposable defogging device the team is developing attaches to the end of a surgeon's laparoscope before surgery. This will eliminate the need to remove the surgical instrument during operations for cleaning.

As a urologist, Wayne Poll (center), often performs laparoscopic surgery at Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus. One of his biggest frustrations: his instruments. He has to remove his laparoscope for cleaning and defogging six to seven times an hour, which lengthens the time of surgery and heightens the risk.

Earlier this year Poll - along with his partner Caroline Crisafulli (left), the office manager for his surgical practice - launched Minimally Invasive Devices at TechColumbus, an incubator loosely associated with Ohio State. The incubator assigned Jodi Wolfe (center), a former pharmaceutical saleswoman who is working on a master's degree in healthcare administration at Ohio State, to work on market research.

Their product, called Clear-VU, reduces fogging, and Poll figures it could cut time in the operating room on the most common, one- to two-hour operations by as much as 20 percent. They have already developed a prototype and filed for patent protection of Clear-VU, and intend to file with the FDA for approval of the device by mid-2007. The device would probably sell for between $100 and $150.

Their timing is auspicious. Minimally invasive surgery is one of the hottest trends in medicine. In the U.S. alone, surgeons will perform 4.4 million of these operations this year, up from just a handful in 1990. --Patricia B. Gray