Written by Urvashi Jha & CI MED Marketing & Communications
Carle Illinois College of Medicine students have earned top honors in prestigious campus-wide competitions for their work in leveraging innovation and entrepreneurship to advance medicine.
CI MED student Bara Saadah is the recipient of the $10,000 Fiddler Innovation Fellowship, a campus-wide award recognizing cross-disciplinary student innovation to address societal or global challenges.
Saadah developed an anti-fatigue vest for surgeons to reduce fatigue and provide muscle relief. The vest utilizes multiple sensors to measure the surgeon's posture in real-time and provides feedback, alerting them to correct any improper posture that may lead to fatigue. The long-term goal of the anti-fatigue vest is to address the physician shortage by reducing early retirement of surgeons due to deteriorating health.
“I am honored to be the recipient of the Fiddler Innovation Fellowship, and I am excited about the impact it will have on my work in innovation,” Saadah said. “With this award, I plan to continue developing the anti-fatigue vest with my co-founder Caywin Zhuang (CI MED Class of 2023). We aim to refine our innovation and create a product that addresses the needs of surgeons while promoting their well-being.”
Saadah is also the CEO and founder of a startup called Diabeta Coach which helps manage stress in patients with Type 1 and 2 diabetes by providing personalized one-on-one coaching services that ultimately improve their long-term health outcomes.
“The Fiddler Innovation Fellowship will also offer support for my startup, Diabeta Coach, which aims to alleviate the stress that patients with diabetes experience from the daily tasks required to manage their diabetes. As I begin my residency in psychiatry at the Carle Foundation Hospital this summer, I am eager to use the support from the Fiddler Innovation Fellowship to continue innovating at the intersection of engineering and medicine,” he adds.
The Fiddler Innovation Fellowship is part of a $2 million endowment from Jerry Fiddler and Melissa Alden to the University of Illinois. The endowment supports the Emerging Digital Research and Education in Arts Media (eDream) Institute at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and innovative students who address societal or global challenges using an interdisciplinary approach.
Finalists for the 2023 Illinois Innovation Award
Two CI MED students were selected as finalists for the Illinois Innovation Award, which honors University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign students for excellence in cutting-edge innovation or translational research that addresses real-world problems and has the potential to make a significant impact.
Anant Naik (Carle Illinois College of Medicine): Anant Naik is developing a new treatment that uses light therapy to lengthen the lives of patients who have undergone surgery to remove an aggressive form of brain cancer. Glioblastoma is the deadliest brain cancer with 15,000 new diagnoses every year. He is developing a device called BEACON that could potentially revolutionize brain tumor patient care by selectively destroying residual cancer cells and extending the lives of glioblastoma patients. Naik’s team placed third in the Cozad New Venture Challenge finals, along with a $20,000 investment to refine their prototype and advance toward product testing.
Christian Guerrero-Juarez (Carle Illinois College of Medicine): Scarring of complex tissues, like skin, represents an unmet challenge that impacts the clinical outcome and long-term well-being of individuals globally. It is estimated that 100 million patients worldwide acquire skin scars because of disease, trauma, or elective surgeries. Guerrero-Juarez’ cutting-edge research aims to address the biology of skin repair. His research findings have created a new paradigm shift in the field by demonstrating, for the first time, that skin wounds can bypass scarring – the default repair mechanism and regenerate de novo via cellular reprogramming. Guerrero-Juarez aims to identify and generate new therapeutics to induce skin wounds to heal by regeneration in lieu of scarring via modulation of iron signaling. His work is foundational and will inspire new research and technological advancements aimed at modulation of pathological scarring in complex tissues beyond skin.
Cozad New Venture Challenge Health Care Track Awardees
The 2023 Cozad New Venture Challenge included a new health care track, launched in collaboration with Carle Illinois College of Medicine. The new track includes awards for both Health Innovation and Sports Medicine. It provides access to top-notch mentors for health care teams and guidance related to commercializing medical technologies, and access to a prize pool for health care-related teams only. In all, CI MED teams won over $76,000 in prizes to support their innovations. Cash prize winners are listed below.
Health Innovation
- Grand Prize Winner – BEACON (Lead: Anant Naik) $25,000 total investment
- STREAM (Lead: Mukul Govande) and Diabeta Coach (Lead: Bara Saadah) – $10,000 each
- Cervicare (Lead: Bhargavee Gnanasambandam) – $5,000
- Sound Asleep (Lead: Maggie Li) - $1,250
- HydroDyn (Lead: Richard Um) – $500
- Ambiscope (Lead: Michael Pozin), CeFlow (Lead: Megan Lim), and SKINthetics (Lead: Christian Guerrero-Juarez) - $250 each
Sports Medicine
- Grand Prize Winner – Neuronetix (Lead: Neddie Byron) $20,000
- Fall Prevention (Lead: Brian Wadugu) – $5000
Most of the teams above also won in-kind support. Other in-kind support prizes went to: AccurTone, Beta Biofluidics, Bonobo.care, Dew Health, and Medical Nutrition. Click here to learn more about these CI MED teams that competed in the Cozad Challenge.
Editor's note: The original version of this article was written by Urvashi Jha of the Technology Entrepreneur Center in The Grainger College of Engineering. It is available here.