Two teams of physician-innovators from Carle Illinois College of Medicine have been selected as finalists at this year’s Cozad New Venture Challenge, competing for funding to launch game-changing solutions to advance health care. CI MED teams AUVI and Amniosense are among seven teams advancing to the competition’s final round, to be held in Chicago on April 17.
Auvi, led by CI MED student Richie Li, proposes a new wearable device aimed at advancing clinical care, improving safety, and allowing for a better quality of life for patients receiving dialysis care for chronic kidney disease. The team says the device could be placed after every arteriovenous fistula (AVF) procedure for remote monitoring to enable early detection and surveillance. The innovation was developed as a CI MED Capstone project and expanded with the Cozad competition.
AmnioSense, led by Tessabella Magliochetti Cammarata, is an at-home amniotic fluid detection system built into a disposable underwear liner to provide a reliable test ensuring timely and accurate identification of labor onset. Magliochetti Cammarata says the non-invasive method could reduce the anxiety and financial costs of unnecessary trips to the hospital by giving pregnant women an objective indication of when labor has started.
Cozad teams are challenged to innovate marketable solutions to address critical problems including health care. Finalists were chosen by a judging panel based on their presentations on the Cozad New Venture Challenge Demo Day on April 11. Teams selected as finalists have earned an opportunity to pitch their ideas at the Finals Event on April 17 at Portal Innovations in Chicago. All the teams, including the finalists who took part in the Demo Day, will be eligible for prizes totaling over $400,000 in funding, cash, and in-kind prizes.
CI MED students led 25 of the 51 health care-focused startups competing for funding from across the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus in the competition’s Healthcare Track. The Healthcare Track was added to the program in 2023 as a collaborative effort between the Technology Entrepreneur Center and CI MED. Prizes will be awarded in the categories of Healthcare Innovation, Sports Medicine, and Rural Health on April 24 at the Year-End Entrepreneurship Celebration and Awards Ceremony at the Campus Instructional Facility.
Three projects in this year’s competition are based on CI MED Capstone projects in which medical students work with interdisciplinary teams to develop solutions to real-world medical problems. CI MED’s participation in the competition is part of the college’s commitment to re-engineering the future of medicine through innovation and entrepreneurship that advances health care and improves patient outcomes.
Other CI MED teams win honors at Cozad New Venture Challenge and beyond
- CI MED team DefEndo took home Pitch Night honors earlier this month. They pitched a proposal to create a new diagnostic test for endometriosis, aimed at earlier diagnosis and treatment before women experience complications. “Women’s health in general is underfunded and under-researched, so I hope that winning this pitching contest will give women’s health problems more visibility,” team leader Kyra Hulse said.
- Radiant Looms, MedTerms, and AmnioSense earned the EnterpriseWorks Student Startup Tenancy Prize, which includes access to the co-working and conference room spaces in EnterpriseWorks, the startup incubator at the Research Park. RadiantLooms is an all-woman team developing special garments to protect babies, especially those who are in neonatal intensive care, from radiation exposure during medical imaging.
Two other CI MED teams have already taken top honors at other innovation competitions.
- MenoPatch – aimed at improving care for women experiencing menopausal symptoms – won first place at Founders Forge 2024, the Midwest’s largest student-run startup conference. (Read more here.)
- CAPSLocks Scalp Cooling System – This scalp cooling system that prevents chemotherapy-induced alopecia in breast cancer patients – took first place at The Grainger College of Engineering Open House Showcase. “We hope our device can eventually make hair loss prevention an accessible reality for every patient undergoing chemotherapy. In this way, we hope to shift the paradigm of health innovation towards solving real-life practical lifestyle applications in the lives of cancer patients and not just focus on diagnosis or treatment," team leader Mahima Goel said.
CI MED-led projects or projects with a CI MED team member are listed below.
*Denotes a proposal based on a Capstone Innovation.
** This team is led by a CI MED student who is also affiliated with another college. CI MED team leaders are noted.
- ACL Shield aims to design socks for female soccer players to protect them from potentially career-ending injuries, particularly an ACL tear. Team Lead: Sydni Towe
- AMELIA is an automated lower extremity rehabilitation machine that enables one therapist to see multiple patients at a time, minimizes the required physical labor of therapists, and therefore reduces the treatment cost for patients with lower extremity movement impairment. Team Lead: Justin Kim
- AmnioSense aims to empower rural expectant mothers by providing a reliable at-home amniotic fluid detection test, ensuring timely and accurate identification of labor onset, and minimizing unnecessary trips to healthcare facilities. Team Lead: Tessabella Magliochetti Cammarata
- AspirVent aims to reduce the risk of pneumonia and lung injury in the OR and ICU by introducing novel endotracheal tubes that tackle the known challenge of pooled oral secretions and vomitus in the airway of intubated patients, addressing the commonly unresolved concern of oral/GI content inhalation during tube insertion and removal. Team Lead: Aashka Shah
- **Atlas Neurosurgical Navigation expands the treatment opportunities for patients with neurotrauma from underserved settings using new developments in surgical navigation. Team Lead: Al Smith
- AutoPap proposes an AI-powered fully automated machine for cervical cancer screening.
- *Auvi seeks to provide continuous fistula monitoring for end-stage renal disease patients with an arteriovenous fistula. Team Lead: Richie Li
- CAPSLocks Scalp Cooling System is a first-of-its-kind ultra-compact and affordable continuous fluid-flowing scalp cooling system that prevents chemotherapy-induced alopecia in breast cancer patients. Team Lead: Mahima Goel
- Cervicare is developing a novel point-of-care test to circumvent the need for traditional pap testing to increase accessibility to this vital screening procedure, particularly in underserved communities. Team Lead: Nellie Haug
- Contextual Med offers specialized APIs for medical AI developers, enhancing LLM abilities to understand clinical intent, modulate outputs by medical contexts, and generate guideline-compliant outputs. Team Lead: Sam Rawal
- Cureloid seeks to provide the only workable keloid treatment for 18 million patients in the US with these skin tumors.
- DefEndo – This team is developing an endometriosis screening test to diagnose women an average of 10 years earlier, to expedite access to treatment, mitigate the risk of infertility, and prevent other unnecessary complications. Team Lead: Kyra Hulse
- ElectraGlow – This is a portable E-skin face mask device with electrical stimulation to stun the neuromuscular junction and act as a "needless Botox" while being an affordable and sustainable solution to common dermatological problems.
- GRAZE Anatomy Kitchen - Leading a dining revolution against obesity, the team proposes restaurants featuring health-forward, minimally processed meals, meticulously crafted by medical students to promote wellness and sustainable eating habits. Team Lead: Brian Mehdian
- HLTH – Applying the Uber concept to healthcare, the team proposes a cutting-edge app, allowing physicians to log in whenever they’re available and patients to access on-the-spot virtual medical services. Team Lead: Phillip Chun
- LapSonix - To increase visibility during laparoscopic surgeries, the team proposes integrating an ultrasonic component into laparoscopes, which would allow for self-cleansing of the scope lens. Team Lead: Debora Nya
- Luminous – This is an AI-smartphone-enabled screening system to make diabetic retinopathy screening more accessible for underserved populations to reduce rates of irreversible blindness. Team Lead: Justin Huynh
- MedBlock leverages blockchain technology & AI to revolutionize healthcare administration, streamlining care coordination and empowering patients, providers, and payers with a decentralized and efficient platform.
- Medical Nutrition - The Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) Nutrition App will integrate current evidence-based nutrition recommendations for the treatment of CKD with engaging digital media concepts. Its focus is to provide more meal options for CKD patients, and in turn, improve their quality of life.
- MedTerms is a software product designed to make medical school more approachable by reducing the cognitive and emotional burden associated with medical education. The product would provide students with a structured system to visually organize concepts and make connections.
- *MenoPatch – This solution is aimed at empowering women with customizable and non-invasive relief from menopause symptoms with a convenient skin patch. Team Lead: David Krist
- MobiBoost – This team proposes a wheelchair add-on focused on assisting or completely motorizing a manual wheelchair, with a special design to tackle crevices and small bumps at a fraction of the cost of an electric wheelchair.
- NIRolytics is a novel Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) cap powered by an AI-computational model that uses patient history data to help emergency medical staff quickly distinguish between hemorrhagic and ischemic strokes and act quickly to reduce the extent of irreversible brain damage. Team Lead: Richard Um
- Project SafeCath proposes a device that is instantly able to detect biofilms with the use of biomarkers to eliminate the need for urine culture tests for catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs).
- Pulmoplay is a video game interface that attaches to the Pulmonary Function Test periphery to transform the PFT process, helping patients follow instructions and decreasing their anxiety. Team Lead: Emily Edwards
- Radiant Looms – The team proposes a shielding device to protect premature infants from radiation exposure from repeated chest X-rays. Team Lead: Annie Tigranyan
- RADical Solutions - Radiation-safe underwear for female surgeons. Team Lead: Maria Bederson
- Renova Kidney Perfusion System focuses on revolutionizing the transplantation landscape by ensuring continuous warm kidney perfusion, to enhance the success of deceased-donor kidney transplants. Team Lead: Connor Oltman
- *RxMind is an LLM-based software application aimed at increasing medication adherence amongst stroke patients, via patient and caregiver education & risk stratification, resulting in decreased incidence of recurrent strokes and improved quality of medical care. Team Lead: Radhika Duvvuri
- Salvage focuses on improving health care waste management practices – focusing on sustainability, cost-effectiveness, and environmental responsibility. Team Lead: Jona Kerluku
- Sensiboo - Leveraging biometrics to analyze and optimize infant mental health to improve lifelong outcomes.
- Tumestent offers a minimally invasive stenting solution for vasculogenic erectile dysfunction. Team Lead: John Squire
- VENA (Venous Entry with Non-tamperable Access) is an IV catheter system designed to prevent IV drug use in patients with opioid use disorder. The device creates long-term IV access that can only be used for prescribed antibiotics. This team won the Best Pitch Award on Demo Day.
The Cozad New Venture Challenge is an annual event featuring a diverse array of teams, each at different stages of the startup lifecycle. It is organized by the Technology Entrepreneur Center at Illinois. Read more here.