Past I-Corps Projects

Predictive Model for Food Safety

Christopher Doona, Florence Feeherry, Edward Ross, Kenneth Kustin, Frida Petersen Albert, Maneesh Ramanadham, Kelly Zheng

This invention is a MATLAB based food safety management tool that utilizes a mathematical predictive model for microbiology evaluation of microorganisms. The technology will be particularly beneficial for food shelf life safety analysis within a food supply chain: supplier, manufacturer, distributor, and retailer such as supermarkets.

The technology also addresses the biochemical reasons underlying changes in bacterial population dynamics and provides a way to control target microorganisms when designing product formulations, or when processing foods with parameters as pressures, temperatures, or other agents to achieve effective pasteurization, disinfection, or sterilization of food, for example, in dairy industry.

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Beneficially Stabilized Probiotics in Fat-Containing Spreads

Dan Perlman, Sining Sun, Jiujun Zhang, Kanjun Li, Keren Sun

Probiotics have become a major factor in the choice of foods by health-conscious consumers and provide a number of benefits. This invention enables cheaper and faster manufacturing of low water activity fat-containing probiotic spreads and butters made from nuts, seeds and beans, with long-term survival of probiotic particles in the butter and extended shelf life.

The technology introduces a manufacturing method for health butters and spreads made from blending anhydrous probiotic bacteria slurries in vegetable oil prior to crystallization of the structuring fat. No cold storage will be required to maintain probiotic bacterial viability over 12-month, which benefits packaging and transportation.

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Coffee Bean Flour Preserves Antioxidants and Caffeine

Dan Perlman

The current invention relates to a new method for partially baking (“par-baking”) green coffee beans and milling them into a fine flour that not only preserves the CGA and other nutrient levels but also retains the caffeine. The ingredient has a low cost of production with multiple commercial uses including food, health/wellness, personal care and dermatological products. The flour is palatable as an ingredient in healthy foods and beverages including coffee, tea, ice cream, smoothies, energy snacks, breakfast bars, baked desserts, breads, cereals and other edible goods.

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AdaptaMaze

Shantanu Jadhav, Jacob Olson, John Bladon, Xin Yao Lin, Faye Raymond

Systems neuroscientists strive to understand the brain. The field often records rodents foraging for rewards to learn about learning, memory, and addiction. Currently, behavioral tracks are developed individually by graduate students inexperienced in mechanical and electrical engineering. This practice costs time, money, and limits experiments. The AdaptaMaze system for behavioral rodent experiments is customizable, adaptable, and scalable. The solution allows scientists to complete better experiments faster, advancing our understanding of the brain.

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NLP Project

Arnold Kamis, Mahesh Neralkar, Chris Minkwon Choi, Yonah Shafner

Drug development is a complicated and time-intensive and money-intensive process, with the timeline from when a potential candidate is discovered to when it is brought to market, can be as long as 12 years. There have been many computational and machine learning approaches for drug discovery with great success. Our goal is to use the parsing of PubMed abstracts using Natural Language Processing methods to determine drug repurposing candidates given a search term. The first step is to find key features or words that can help us determine if a compound or a drug is a candidate or not. We will do that using known repurposed drugs and then test on novel drugs.

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Working Well

Joanne Nicholson, Kush Singh, Wentao Li, Bertha Asare

WorkingWell (WW) is a research-based, feasibility-tested mobile app to help people with mental illness succeed at and sustain employment. WW users set and achieve goals, establish routines, learn to get along with others, and develop coping skills contributing to workplace success and tenure. WW fills the gap between what we know about mental illness and employment and what we do about it, to enhance individual outcomes and reduce employer/employee assistance, state agency and provider costs.

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HydroGel

Bing Xu, Quixin Zhang, Christian Gochez, Levi Goldfarb

A hydrogel—as the name suggests—is a gel that consists of over 90% water. Although mixtures with such a high concentration of water are usually liquids, certain solutes are able to cross-link with enough tensile integrity to form an internal mesh, allowing water to take on a 3-dimensional, semi-solid structure. These solutes vary, but Dr. Xu’s lab combines short peptides with small bioactive molecules that then self-assemble into what is essentially an interlaced peptide web, able to retain a significant amount of water within a few seconds. This hydrogel exhibits distinct properties such as instant formation, biocompatibility, and oxygen-permeability, which render it great potential in the emergency medical industry.

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Enoch Therapeutics

Daniel Acker (Brandeis M.S. ‘14, Ph.D. ‘18), Domenico Bullara (Ph.D), Madhura Shringare (MBA,Brandeis IBS)

Enoch plans to use artificial intelligence to identify high-quality drug formulations for degenerative disease. Their therapeutics will buffer terminally differentiated cells and prevent their entry into degenerative programs. Their machine learning models will learn general representations of the regulatory networks governing mammalian cells. Enoch Therapeutics will incorporate causal relationships into their models using novel algorithms as well as data from single cell sequencing and perturbation experiments in naturally aging animals and cell lines. Their use of natural aging as a disease model will permit rapid and powerful hit validation by translating across animal models. Their causal machine learning models and adaptable biological model systems will provide high-confidence therapeutic predictions for a range of degenerative diseases.

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SeniorTells

Gavin Shen (Brandeis B.S. ‘19), Mah Ebrahimi (Ph.D Candidate, International Economics and Finance), Xinyue Liu (Chemistry Ph.D. candidate )

SeniorTells aims to elevate the college application experience for international students. By moving the offline services into the online world, SeniorTells provides access to the originally inaccessible resources, which offers equal opportunities for international students. Specifically, they would like to help high school students have a deeper understanding of universities and make better decisions by building personal connections with current college students. Currently, SeniorTells supports video chat, live streaming, and content sharing. Users can easily schedule a video chat or online campus tour with their college fellows. Meanwhile, registered users will have easy access to request a one-on-one mentorship with other comprehensive services.

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Heat-Storage Materials

Grace Han (Ph.D., Principal Investigator), Mihael Gerkman (Ph.D. candidate, Brandeis University), Timothy Wiggin (Ph.D., Neuroscience), Leiming Tian (Brandeis Ph.D. ‘18), Kundan Kumar Sharma (MBA student, Brandeis International Business School)

Heat-Storage Materials develops green technology to improve startup reliability and prevent engine damage in vehicles. In areas where temperatures often drop below ‒20 °C (‒4 °F), such as the northern U.S. and Canada, cars have trouble starting. At temperatures below 0 °C, oil becomes thicker and denser than usual and increases friction, wearing down the engine parts and in extreme cases, preventing the engine from starting. To combat this issue, the lab has developed a material that can capture waste heat from a running engine, store it, and release it when exposed to LED lights, which can thereby act as an instant on-demand engine oil heater. Integrating this material into an oil pan provides a facile on-demand method for heating oil. This device will give customers a convenient, reliable, durable, and reusable way to improve engine longevity and start-up during the winter months.

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Reach into Research

Gabe Bronk (Brandeis B.S. ‘11, Ph.D. ‘18), Alicia Duce (High school senior, Waltham High School), Ariel Xie (M.A. student, Brandeis International Business School)

Science teachers are constantly looking for new ways to engage their students. Reach Into Research will create videos and relevant activities for use in high school classrooms. While current science videos go into depth, they are not engaging or are engaging but do not clearly explain concepts. Their videos will teach challenging content while also being very funny. Aligned with the national science curriculum standards, the videos and activities will easily fit into any teacher’s lessons. Additionally, students will become interested when learning information that is useful in their daily lives — the videos will tie in health, wellness, environmental protection, and other information that allows students to make informed decisions. Activities will involve experiments, computer modeling, and data-analysis projects based on cutting-edge science research. This gives students the opportunity to be the scientists and motivates them to pursue STEM careers. Moreover, students’ participation in research is by far the best way to learn the scientific method, which is the most important concept in science, yet the traditional curriculum teaches it ineffectively. It is critical that students understand how scientific discoveries are made so that they believe scientific findings and so that they know how to determine whether something is true.

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Stryx Biotech: Biomarker Monitoring

Richard A. Roy (PhD ‘18, Biochemistry), Jacqueline L. Naffin, PhD (Brandeis Research Associate), Mengchun Li (MBA Student, Finance, IBS), Víctor Manuel Suárez (MS/MBA Student, Biology and Healthcare Management, Heller/GSAS)

Stryx Biotech provides fast, accurate, continuous monitoring of essential blood biomarkers for health care and health optimization. A biomarker or biological marker is a measurable indicator of a state of health. Blood biomarkers are commonly used for the monitoring and treatment of a variety of conditions such as diabetes, high cholesterol, vitamin and mineral deficiencies, stress, and organ damage. Their device allows the wearer to quickly gain and continuously accumulate rich, detailed analyses of their blood, providing vital information to make insightful decisions about their health on a daily – or even hourly – basis.

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Effy

Diego Placido (Alumnus, Psychology, Neuroscience, and Computer Science), Samantha Malmberg (Graduate Student, Neuroscience), Xiaotong Liu (Graduate Student, IBS), Francis Hwang (Graduate Student, Heller)

Effy is an effective research-based service that assesses cognitive performance and provides immersive and interactive Cognitive Enrichment exercises through Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence. Their approach focuses primarily on components of Visual Attention and Executive Functions - necessary for overall development, including emotional and behavioral regulation. The overarching goal is to make these protective and compensatory benefits accessible to all communities, irrespective of socioeconomic status.

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Diversitydatakids: Monitoring Inclusion in the U.S.

Clemens Noelke (Research Director, ICYFP, Heller), Huiyan Zhang (BS Student, Computer Science, Mathematics, and Economics), R Matthews (BS/ BA Student, Computer Science and African & Afro-American Studies)

Diversitydatakids is a comprehensive information system to monitor the state of wellbeing, diversity, opportunity and equity for U.S. children. Despite increasing child diversity, persistent inequities, and recognition of equity as a policy goal, policymakers and practitioners must currently piece together limited information from disparate and fragmented sources to document equitable progress and policy gaps. To help fill this gap, diversitydatakids.org offers the first comprehensive, equity-focused information system to monitor progress towards improved wellbeing for children of all racial/ethnic groups through the creation and dissemination of unique indicators and analysis of: 1) the state of wellbeing, diversity, opportunity and equity of children in the U.S., and 2) the availability, capacity and research evidence supporting the effectiveness of public policies and programs to equitably serve children of all racial and ethnic groups and reduce disparities among them.

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iRemember: Memory Support App

Olivia Hoy (BS Student, Biology), Ryan Xu (BS Student, Applied Mathematics and Neuroscience)

iRemember is an app that helps people with memory problems caused by conditions such as dementia and TBI to remember things in their daily lives. Features include reminders to take medication, medical appointments, daily organizers, calendars, and other features that make their lives easier. The color scheme for the app is dementia-friendly and it includes visual and audio reminders for patients with sensory impairments. A confirmation system for medications and reminders allows family members and medical professionals to ensure patients have taken the correct medications and are following their daily schedules.

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Arca: Open-Access 3D Printing Platform

Dr. Alexandra Ratzlaff (Faculty, Department of Classical Studies), Yu Lu (MBA ’17), Kun Qiu (MS Student, Business Analytics)

Arca is an open-access online platform where projects can upload not only their results such as 3D models and lidar surveys but also instructional tutorials explaining the process used to create these products (models etc.) and detailed information on what equipment or software was utilized. This platform or open-source receptacle is free for users to see results as a useful learning tool for the general public and students but for a fee archaeological projects and institutions/universities could have further access to the tutorials and other more detailed information.

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Transcriptional Enhancer Prediction (TEP) for Cancer Research

Cherubin Manokaran (BS Student, Neuroscience and Computer Science), Ana Ward (MS/MBA Student, Biotech and Healthcare Management)

Transcriptional Enhancer Prediction (TEP) is a platform for predicting highly specific c-Myc binding partners and would support the identification of new targets for cancer research. c-Myc (hereafter Myc) is amplified in nearly all cancers. Interestingly, Myc binding sites are conserved within but not always across tissue types because Myc begins to bind at low-affinity, variable e-boxes. Integrating histone methylation and Myc occupancy data for several cancer cell types on this platform reveals tissue-specific interactions between Myc and potential binding partners and enhancers. Therefore, this platform identifies novel transcriptional targets that are relevant to cancer cell survival and proposes other ways of targeting Myc for cancer therapy such as exploiting tissue-specific protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions. Additionally, it facilitates the prediction of highly specific binding partners and enhancers of Myc and other master transcriptional regulators in other contexts, such as drug resistance.

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GreenLabs

David Waterman (Research assistant), Brenda Lemos (Researcher), Shen Wang (PhD student, neuroscience),Yi Jin (PhD student, Biochemistry and Biophysics)

More plastic has been manufactured in the last 10 years than all of the last century. This overplastification has had detrimental effects in our planet. Science—specifically laboratory work - is partly to blame. Much of the lab-grade plastics could not be recycled traditionally. Until now: Brenda Lemos and her team are working on a project to recycle America’s 6 Million tons of plastic lab waste.

There are 20,500 research institutions world-wide that produce approximately 6 million tons of plastic waste per year – the equivalent weight of ~65 cruise ships. Of this 6 million tons, >85% ends up in landfills where it slowly degrades over centuries. GreenLabs will tackle this problem by collecting and recycling plastic lab waste and reintroducing it back into an $80 billion market as raw material. With over 10,000 research labs in the country, and over 300 in the greater Boston area, GreenLabs will both improve our planet and profit from an untapped market.

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Flyght

Tatevik Sarkissian (PHD student), Zachary Knecht ( Graduate, Neuroscience)

Our product is a 3-D printed arena in which to assess Drosophila melanogaster behavior. It will allow a wide variety of analyses, including control of specific neural circuits in awake, behaving animals via light (optogenetics). The arena will sit atop an LED bank inside an enclosed camera housing to allow visualization via infrared light, and optogenetic control of behavior.

The product will be marketed to professional researchers, for whom custom printed arenas can be matched to particular needs at little cost from the flexibility of 3-D printing technology. It will also be marketed towards teaching labs, K-12 school science programs, and even for individuals, for which it will serve demonstration purposes of the principles underlying neural circuits and behavior, promoting STEM education. In this case, arenas and particular animals will be provided as a kit, allowing demonstrations of particular behaviors with reference to the underlying, cutting edge neuroscience research. In short, our product is poised to broach a largely untapped market existing in the space between the needs of educators, amateur and professional scientists, for whom a diverse set of needs is met by our flexible, modular platform.

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Learn Through Technology (LTT)

Vivekanand Pandey Vimal (TRISH Postdoctoral), David Hampton (Graduate), Pooja Chandrakar (Graduate, Physics), Zixiao Chen (Graduate, Pure Mathematics)

Learn Through Technology (LTT) believes that inquiry-based learning is the key to spark high schoolers interests in STEM. We are developing a curriculum to pair high schoolers with PhD students to do hands-on research projects. We will be mediating these interactions and providing the basic experimental research modules which includes technical devices/materials along with background and functional information on the experimental setup. The aim is for the high schoolers to build a portfolio with a scientific project that helps them stand out as doing graduate level science when applying to college.

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TRIBE

Reazur Rahman (Ph.D, computational bioIogy), Weijin Xu (PhD student, Molecular and Cell Biology)

HyperTRIBE technology uses a genetic technique to identify RNA targets of a queried RNA-binding protein (RBP) in a cell-specific manner. HyperTRIBE is capable of identifying RBP targets in as little as 150 cells and is capable of returning a ranked target list for a queried RBP. HyperTRIBE assay can be conducted both in vivo and in vitro and avoids expensive and time-consuming biochemical techniques required for competitors such as CLIP and RIP.

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Artificial Intelligence Capital Management (A.I. Capital Management)

Marshall Chang (MBA ’16, IBS), Zhengyang Zhou (MS Student, Computer Science), Joyce Yu (MA and BA ’17, IBS)

The field of A.I. has been booming for the past few years, with most significantly the advance of Deep Reinforcement Learning, which first solved the classic Atari games, then conquered the crown of all A.I. tasks, Go, by beating human Go world champion in a landslide. The team is applying a Deep Learning system to trading financial markets, which to traders, are nothing but another game to solve. This is a young field where everyday new research pushes the field forward. Their innovation focuses on adapting and evolving the best current learning algorithm to the task of trading.

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Enzymatic Cleavage of Branched Peptides for Targeting Mitochondria

Hongjian He (PhD Student,Chemistry), Xiaoyi Chen (MS Student, Chemistry)

The Enzymatic Cleavage of Branched Peptides for Targeting Mitochondria team aims to achieve mitochondria-targeting drug delivery via biocompatible peptide for inhibiting the growth of cancer cells. They will conjugate a well-established protein tag (i.e., FLAG-tag) to self-assembling motifs affords the precursors that form micelles. Enzymatic cleavage of the hydrophilic FLAG motif (DDDDK) by enterokinase (ENTK) turns the micelles to nanofibers. After the uptake by cells, the branched peptides mainly localize in mitochondria. Incubating isolated mitochondria with branched peptides cleaves the branch and turns the micelles to nanofibers. Moreover, the micelles of the precursors are able to deliver cargos (either small molecules or proteins) into cells, largely to mitochondria, within two hours. As the first report of using enzyme-instructed self-assembly for targeting mitochondria and delivery molecular cargos to mitochondria, this work illustrates a fundamentally new molecular motif for targeting mitochondria and exploring the applications of protease-instructed self-assembly for biomedicine.

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Open Source Science Supplies

Stephen Van Hooser (Faculty, Biology), Shen Wang (PhD Student, Neuroscience), Andrea Stacy (PhD Student, Neuroscience), Chelsea Groves-Kuhnle (PhD Student, Neuroscience), Nathan Schneider (BS Student, Neuroscience)

Open Source Science Supplies proposes to investigate the feasibility of creating an open source store at Brandeis that would allow the sale of small parts. The designs would be open source to satisfy constraints of funding agencies and to allow innovation, but customers would have the option to buy the part or device for a reasonable charge. The cost would cover the manufacturing and overhead, and also include a donation to an "innovation fund" in the lab that would allow continued development or improvements of the parts. Further, the presence of the store would reinforce best practices in part design and documentation, which would benefit both the lab and customers in labs nationwide.

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Recip Grocery Data Platform

Benjamin Segal (BS Student, Computer & Neuroscience), Rafi Cohen (BS Student, Computer Science), Geoffry Kao (BS Student, Computer Science), Anthony Liu (BS Student, Computer Science), Dani Sim (BS Student, Computer Science), Nick Krebs (BS Student, Computer Science)

Recip is trying to solve the issue of groceries that get out of date by scanning the receipt. Moreover, the technology will use data analysis to build a better system to reduce food waste and save money. It will gather data to manage export and import product prices and give price comparison between nearby supermarkets. It will be using image ocr to export the receipt information and deep neural network to analyze the information and the data.

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New Strategy to Treat Chronic Infections

Lizbeth Hedstrom (Faculty, Chemistry & Biology), Deviprasad Gollapalli (Staff Scientist, Biology), Minjia Zhang (Staff Scientist, Biology), Ryan Cullinane (BS Student, Biochemistry), Xingyou Wang (PhD Student, Chemistry)

Bacteria known as persisters are resistant to antibiotics because they are dormant, and they again become susceptible to antibiotics when they resume growth. Therefore an attractive strategy to eliminate persisters is to identify compounds that resuscitate persisters. Less than a handful of such compounds have been reported, and none have progressed to the clinic. The team has discovered several compounds, exemplified by P226, that cause bacteria to initiate growth prematurely. They hypothesize that these compounds will cause quiescent cells to become sensitive to commonly used antibiotics, thus providing a more effective treatment for chronic infections.

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Cardiac Care Center

Diana Bowser (Faculty, Heller)

In Rwanda, cardiovascular disease (CVD) kills more people than malaria, HIV and tuberculosis combined. Of particular concern in Rwanda is the high number of children and young adults suffering from advanced rheumatic heart disease (RHD)—a repercussion from untreated strep throat. RHD leads to deterioration of the valves of the heart and open heart surgery is needed for survival. Currently in Rwanda there are no cardiac surgeons and there is no dedicated facility to perform cardiac operations. In addition to RHD, a large and growing number of adult Rwandans suffer from other CVDs. The Cardiac Care Center will become a referral hospital for the region, increasing access to evidence-based care.

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3-D Printing Functional Models for Education

Andrew Sawyer (PhD Student, Molecular Biology), Denise Hilton (PhD Student, Cell/Cellular and Molecular Biology), Nicholas Clark ( PhD Student, Molecular Biology)

3-D Printing Functional Models for Education, is developing hands-on models to help teach complex biological concepts. Using 3D printing to create prototypes for inter-connecting proteins and biological concepts.

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Articulate Biosciences

Justin Freeman (MS, Biotechnology), Benjy Cooper (BS’11)

Using our patented ABX platform technology, our mission is to deliver long-lasting pain relief and restoration of mobility to sufferers of osteoarthritis. Through deep understanding of patient and clinician needs, combined with innovative breakthroughs in medical device technology, Articulate Biosciences strives to bring back quality of life by eliminating chronic joint pain.

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Cleanfield Capital Partners

Debarshi Nandy (Faculty, IBS), Kate Salop, former Senior Administrative Dean, IBS, Stephen Cecchetti (Faculty, Finance)

Using data analytics and a portfolio and securitization approach, we have developed a proprietary predictive algorithm which improves the viability of brownfield remediation and redevelopment, making it attractive to private sector funding from impact investors.

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Cryo-electron Microscopy

Joel Meyerson (Faculty, Biochemistry), Jungwon Park (Faculty, Biochemistry)

The first step in obtaining a 3D protein structure with cryo-EM is freezing the target protein molecules into a thin layer of ice. This requires specialized technology which has remained largely unchanged since its inception 30 years ago. The problems associated with cryo-EM sample preparation are rooted in lack of control over the geometry and environment of the protein in the moments before freezing. Their solution aims to mitigate this problem by creating a small fluid cell to encapsulate the protein prior to freezing. This is accomplished with cutting edge materials science and nanofabrication.

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Discovery Teaching

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GreenChoice

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Laissez

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Redesigned Scoliosis Brace

Ingrid Marko (PhD Student, Biochemistry and Biophysics), Megan Robidas (MS/M.B.A Student, Biotechnology, Heller/SSPM)

Redesigned Scoliosis Brace, is a new brace model that has a modifiable hard plastic brace that can be mass produced and adjusted to provide proper treatment and curvature correction as a patient grows, therefore addressing issues of comfort, affordability, requiring multiple braces throughout development, length of treatment period, and manufacturing delays.

Past I-Corps Projects

2020

2019

2018

2017