14 teams supported this year to advance projects with future potential for real-world impact through the Wyss’ technology innovation funnel
Throughout recent years, the Wyss’ Validation Project mechanism has proven to be a highly valuable instrument for selecting and kick-starting projects with early potential for positive impact on healthcare and the environment. Reaching deep into areas with major unmet needs across the diverse Grand Challenges laid out by the Institute, the newly selected projects are driven by multi-talented teams able to develop, validate, and de-risk key technologies, as well as analyze market potential and identify first applications for their approaches.
The projects in this year’s roster aim to innovate environmental monitoring and sustainable manufacturing, and advance new diagnostic and therapeutic solutions designed to ultimately help patients with diseases that cannot be effectively treated yet. Several of the projects are led by Wyss faculty whose teams thought of new ways to combine their world-leading expertise, taking multi-disciplinary approaches that tread new scientific territory to confront long-standing problems head-on.
Renewed projects
TIB: Tolerance-Inducing Biomaterials
Team Lead: Kwasi Adu-Berchie
Faculty: Dave Mooney, Georg Duda
Contact: Ally Chang
Regulatory T cell (Treg) therapies hold immense promise for treating conditions ranging from autoimmune disease to tissue and bone injury, but targeting them to specific tissues in the body and maintaining their efficacy long-term are persistent challenges. Tolerance-Inducing Biomaterials (TIBs) can deliver Tregs to specific tissues while maintaining their function over extended time periods. These materials can also help transform effector T cells (Teff) into Tregs at disease sites, simultaneously removing tissue-destructive cells while amplifying pro-regenerative cells. By helping the body heal itself while minimizing the need for systemic immunosuppression, this approach offers patients safer, longer-lasting treatments.
PFASense: Biosensors for PFAS Monitoring
Team Lead: Simon D’Oelsnitz
Faculty: Pam Silver, Mike Springer
Contacts: Alex Li, Sam Inverso, Emily Stoler
Once heralded for helpful qualities in many industrial and consumer products, such as non-stick cookware, water-repellent clothing, and firefighting foams, PFAs are now recognized as “forever chemicals” because of their long-term persistence in the environment. They are also linked to cancer and other health issues. The PFASense team is developing protein-based biosensors for rapid, on-site PFAs monitoring. The highly sensitive and specific engineered biosensors will enable consumers and health departments unprecedented speed and accuracy when field testing water and other sources for PFAS contamination.
GeneSkin: A Novel mRNA Therapy for Skin and Hair Regeneration
Team Lead: Li Li
Faculty: George Church
Contact: Sam Inverso
Treatments for many skin and hair disorders are limited to symptom management, leaving patients with few options that address the underlying biological causes. The GeneSkin team is developing a promising mRNA therapy to reduce scarring and treat alopecia. Using a state-of-the-art multi-omics platform they developed, the team gains deeper insight into the complex molecular mechanism driving these dermatological conditions and identified a lead target.
A-Seq: Antibody Discovery by Sequencing
Team Leads: Michel Nofal, Namita Sarraf, Kuanwei Sheng
Faculty Lead: Peng Yin
Contact: Sam Inverso
Biologics have revolutionized modern medicine by enabling targeted treatments for previously difficult or untreatable diseases and become some of the most profitable drugs in the past few years. A-Seq is a streamlined drug discovery pipeline that identifies antibodies against therapeutic targets using novel sequencing technology. Critically, this method leapfrogs the most labor-intensive and failure-prone steps of traditional antibody discovery pipelines. Eliminating these hurdles will enable A-Seq to execute on antibody discovery at scale, generating more candidate therapeutics in less time than current approaches.
New projects
REFINE: Next-Gen Biomanufacturing for Advanced Materials
Team Leads: Marika Ziesack, Emily Stoler
Faculty Lead: Pam Silver
Contact: Alex Li
The promise of biomaterials as a replacement for plastic made from petrochemicals is often limited by scalability and material performance. REFINE tackles both through innovations in chemistry and bioengineering. The team is developing broadly deployable nanotechnology to dramatically boost bioreactor productivity while newly engineered microbes and low-cost feedstocks further increase production efficiency. Together, these advances will enable the scalable, affordable and sustainable production of high-performance materials—offering a viable path to sustainable bioplastics at industrial scale.
NeoSense: Ultrasensitive Detection of Sepsis in the Saliva of Neonates
Team Leads: Karan Malhotra, Justin Rolando
Faculty Lead: David Walt
Contact: Gretchen Fougere
Sepsis is a life-threatening condition affecting millions of newborns annually, which cannot currently be rapidly and accurately diagnosed. To help supplant multiple-day blood-based testing and unnecessary use of antibiotics, the NeoSense team is developing an ultra-sensitive test for sepsis-related biomarkers in the saliva of newborns. Using enzyme-free, single-molecule detection technology and a powerful machine learning algorithm, NeoSense could enable faster, more accurate diagnoses—reducing the need for blood draws, long-term health complications, and preventable deaths in this vulnerable patient population.
NERVE: A Novel Platform for Neurodegenerative Disease Diagnosis
Team Leads: Chih-Ping Mao, Gina Wang
Faculty Lead: David Walt
Contact: Gretchen Fougere
Abnormal RNA splicing—a key driver of neurodegenerative disorders including ALS and Alzheimer’s disease—affects millions of people and represents a promising therapeutic target. Yet, patients with these defects remain invisible to current diagnostic tools. The NERVE team is developing the first ultra-sensitive technology to detect these abnormal RNA molecules inside extracellular vesicles—tiny particles circulating in blood that can carry signals from the brain—enabling precise identification of patients for splicing-directed therapies and longitudinal monitoring of treatment response.
THRIVE: Therapeutic Recovery of Injured Vascular Endothelium
Team Leads: Eliz Amar-Lewis
Faculty Leads: Christopher Chen (PI), Natalie Artzi (co-PI)
Contact: Gretchen Fougere
Breakdown of blood vessel walls leads to vascular leaking, thrombosis and inflammation, and drives the progression of cardiovascular disease and acute respiratory distress syndrome. There are currently no approved therapies to restore the vascular barrier, which leads to millions of deaths annually in the US. To halt or reverse disease progression, THRIVE is targeting a key molecular mechanism to restore the integrity of endothelial cell junctions in blood vessel walls through a nanoparticle-based delivery system that allows the expression of a newly identified therapeutic molecule.
Autograph: Point-of-Need Autoimmune Diagnostic and Monitoring Platform
Team Lead: Joshua Rainbow
Faculty Lead: Donald Ingber
Contact: Alex Li
Rapidly diagnosing and monitoring autoimmune diseases to enable timely interventions is hindered by slow, overextended hospital labs. By first focusing on systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), a chronic and often debilitating disease that disproportionately affects women and can’t be effectively monitored, the Autograph team is developing a biomarker-specific at-home and in-clinic diagnostic device. This diagnostic could facilitate timely treatment adjustments that can improve quality of life through personalized, accessible, and cost-effective care for SLE and other autoimmune diseases.
NanoDEX: Nanopore-assisted Drug Exploration for Challenging Targets
Team Lead: Sarah Sandler
Faculty Leads: Peng Yin
Contact: Sam Inverso
Eighty-five percent of potential therapeutic targets for a large range of diseases are “difficult-to-drug” using conventional drug discovery approaches. The NanoDEX screening platform can specifically measure even weak drug-target binding events with simultaneous identification of the involved chemical compounds, eliminating many drawbacks of conventional drug discovery pipelines. By unlocking previously inaccessible drug targets, NanoDEX could accelerate the discovery of new drugs for some of the deadliest and hardest-to-treat diseases.
EnvAI: Enabling in vivo CAR-T therapy through redesigned envelope proteins
Team Leads: Henry Zhou, Siddharth Iyer, Dima Ter-Ovanesyan
Faculty Lead: George Church
Contact: Ally Chang
In vivo CAR-T therapy would eliminate chemotherapy-based lymphodepletion and the time-consuming and costly manufacturing of CAR-T cell products, but major technical challenges remain. The EnvAI team is using a state-of-the-art AI model for redesigning viral envelope proteins that can help target specific cell types. These redesigned envelope proteins will target viral-like particles (VLPs) to T cells and deliver CAR T instructions in vivo, programming T cells to treat autoimmune disorders such as Lupus.
RESTART: Reversal of Age-related Impairments in Bone Regeneration
Team Lead: Harkamal Jhajj
Faculty Leads: George Church, Georg Duda
Contact: Sam Inverso
Age-related decline of immune functions affects the healing of bone tissue following injury. By integrating multiomic sequencing, genetic screening, and AI/ML-driven computational tools, the RESTART team aims to identify molecular targets in regulatory T cells – central players in this aging process—that, if therapeutically reprogrammed and thus rejuvenated, could enhance immune-resilience and bone tissue repair efficiency.
Covodutide: Novel Synthetic Peptide for Hemostasis after Internal Injuries
Team Lead: Maithili Joshi
Faculty Lead: Samir Mitragotri
Contact: Ally Chang
Uncontrolled blood loss, known as hemorrhage, is the primary cause of survivable deaths—accounting for 90% of battlefield deaths and 65% of trauma-related civilian deaths worldwide. Existing interventions like tourniquets and topical agents only work for visible wounds, but for internal wounds, there are currently no non-compressible bleeding treatments that promote rapid clot formation. Covodutide is a newly invented bifunctional peptide that, when injected into the blood stream, travels to wound sites and induces the formation of a vascular plug and hemostasis. By enabling rapid, targeted clotting inside the body, Covodutide could save lives in the critical minutes after trauma.
OvaVasc: Enhancing Ovarian Tissue Transplantation
Team Lead: Luba Perry
Faculty Leads: Christopher Chen, Donald Ingber
Contact: Gretchen Fougere
Ovarian tissue cryopreservation (OTC), the freezing of ovarian tissue for later use, holds great promise to preserve fertility and is currently the only method available to women and prepubertal girls who need urgent cancer treatments. However, ischemic injury and extensive follicular loss following transplantation limit its clinical success. OvaVasc could enhance OTC outcomes with metabolic modulation compounds that can slow metabolism during the critical implantation window and surgical biomaterials that can protect against ischemic injury. By improving graft survival and long-term function, this approach could help young cancer survivors conceive naturally and avoid early menopause.