SteriCoat, a start-up company that has developed a coating technology for medical catheters, earned chemical engineering majors Chris Loose and Joel Moxley, both 2002 graduates in chemical engineering, back-to-back honors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

Loose and Moxley, who are both graduate students in chemical engineering at MIT, collaborated with three other MIT researchers to develop the company’s method to significantly reduce catheter-related infections. Less than one month after their company won the $30,000 MIT Business Venture Robert P. Goldberg Grand Prize in May, it placed first in the annual Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Harvard Biotechnology Club Business Plan Competition. The team received $5,000 and a one-year lease for 1,000 square feet of lab or office space from Cummings Properties, valued at $25,000, for winning the Harvard competition.