MIT Venture Mentoring Service reposted this
🚀 MIT 2025 Healthcare & Bioinnovations Conference & Prize News! 🚀 The #MIT 2025 Healthcare #Innovation Prize Winners have been awarded! Seven early-stage #venture finalists competed for cash awards from over 100 #startup applicants, each with a student or recent graduate co-founder. 🏆 First-Place Winner: Spheric Bio, led by Co-Founder Connor Verheyen PhD’23 and Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology (HST) postdoc, won First-Place. Spheric is revolutionizing stroke prevention and outcomes through heart implants that perfectly match a patient’s unique anatomy using novel #biomaterials. 🥈 Second-Place Winner: nurtur, led by CEO & Co-Founder Kristen Ellefson EMBA’23, secured the Second-Place prize. nurtur is combating postpartum depression using AI/ML technologies and clinically validated protocols to forecast, prevent, and address postpartum depression effectively. 🎉 Audience Choice Award: Merunova, co-founded by former spine surgeon Dheera Ananthakrishnan, MD, SB MechE, MBA'23 received the Audience Choice Award. Merunova is developing #AI powered #MRI signal processing advances to raise spinal diagnosis accuracy to 97% and reduce unnecessary surgeries. Special mention to HaloGen Co-Founder Haining Gao, PhD'22 & PostDoc (current). Halogen is advancing new energy storage chemistries and Liquid Fluorinated Reactant (LFR) hybrid batteries with #healthcare applications. Haining is a MIT Venture Mentoring Service and NSF NE I-Corps Alum. Epic congrats to event co-chairs Marcel Schaack and Clemence Couteau and a special thank you to finals judges Angela Hwang, Deborah Di Sanzo, Meredith Fisher, Victor Lanio, Jonathan Ng, and Rene Mora. The National Science Foundation (NSF) NE I-Corps and MIT Venture Mentoring Service Healthcare & Bio/Life Science #entrepreneurship teams are honored to support your work with promising #founders and #startups. Check out the MIT News article at: https://lnkd.in/eV_aMG3C #venturecapital #Bioinnovations #HealthTech #artificialintelligence #biotech #medicaldevices #digitalhealth #medicine #technology #biology
Kristen Ellefson
1mo
Thank you for your support leading up to the event! Incredible advice
Deborah Di Sanzo
1mo
This was a terrific event! I recommend it for everyone interested in health tech.
nurtur
1mo
Thank you so much! We’re beyond grateful for the support and thrilled to celebrate this milestone. A huge shoutout to Kristen Ellefson for her incredible pitch—your passion is truly inspiring! 💙
MBA Candidate @ MIT Sloan | Healthcare Consultant@BCG | Computational Biology Graduate @ UC Berkeley
1moThank you so much for your tremendous support from start until finish, the SHIP team is really grateful to have such great partners as the National Science Foundation (NSF) NE I-Corps and MIT Venture Mentoring Service and especially you, Paul, on board!