The Wyss Institute’s 2026-2027 Validation Projects

From diagnostics and therapeutics to sustaining life on our planet, 23 Wyss teams are moving promising ideas closer to real-world impact

Each year, the Wyss Institute’s Validation Project program identifies technologies that are ready to move beyond discovery and into the validation phase. Through dedicated funding, technical resources, business development support, market research, and engagement with clinicians, investors, industry experts, and key opinion leaders, the program helps research teams de-risk high-impact innovations on their path to launching them out of the lab.

This year’s class reflects a growing and increasingly competitive innovation pipeline. The review committee, which included the Wyss Mentor Hive and experts in their fields, received 56 high-quality submissions and initially selected 16 based on scientific strength, commercial viability, innovativeness, and likelihood of achieving technology validation.

Following the initial selection, additional support from Harvard University’s Office of the Vice Provost for Research enabled the Wyss to fund seven more highly rated proposals from the original applicant pool, bringing the 2026–2027 cohort to 23 projects. The expanded investment strengthens collaboration among Wyss teams, other Harvard laboratories, and clinical partners while accelerating promising innovations toward broader real-world use.

The new class of Validation Projects also signals where translational research is moving: 43% of the selected projects involve collaborations across different labs, nearly half use AI, and nearly a third incorporate new methodologies using non-animal models to help reduce reliance on traditional animal studies.

The great challenges our society faces are not solved by individuals, they require creative and collaborative teams focused on making a positive impact.

“The great challenges our society faces are not solved by individuals, they require creative and collaborative teams focused on making a positive impact,” said Angelika Fretzen, Wyss Chief Operating Officer and Technology Translation Director. That principle runs through the 2026-2027 Validation Project class, whose teams are advancing technologies across the Wyss’ Grand Challenges: Women’s Health Innovation, Healthy Aging, Brain Health, Cancer Solutions, Infectious Disease Control, and Sustainable Futures — all with the goal of producing the early technical, biological, and commercial evidence needed to move bold science toward patients, partners, and the planet.

Renewed projects

Covodutide: Novel Synthetic Peptide for Hemostasis after Internal Injuries

Team Lead: Malini Mukherji
Faculty Lead: Samir Mitragotri
Contact: Ally Chang

Uncontrolled internal bleeding can kill within minutes, accounting for 90% of battlefield deaths and 65% of trauma-related civilian deaths worldwide. Yet tourniquets and topical hemostats cannot reach many non-compressible injuries. Covodutide is an injectable synthetic peptide designed to home to damaged blood vessels, bind exposed wound-site proteins, and recruit activated platelets to form a stabilizing plug. If validated in large-animal trauma models, it could offer a field-ready way to control otherwise inaccessible hemorrhage in military, emergency, and surgical settings.

EnvAI: In Vivo CAR-T Therapy Through Redesigned Envelope Proteins

Team Lead: Henry Zhou
Faculty Lead: George Church
Contact: Ally Chang

Lupus is a severe autoimmune disease that can damage multiple organs and disproportionately affects women. CAR-T cell therapy has shown potential to induce remission, but current treatment requires removing a patient’s T cells, engineering them outside the body, conditioning chemotherapy, and care at specialized medical centers. EnvAI uses AI-designed envelope proteins to direct virus-like particles to T cells and deliver CAR instructions inside the body. Beginning with lupus, the team will optimize the platform for targeting, delivery, manufacturability, and safety, with potential applications across autoimmune disease and cancer.
*Supported by Harvard University’s Office of the Vice Provost for Research

NanoDEX: Nanopore-assisted Drug Exploration for Challenging Targets

Team Lead: Sarah Sandler
Faculty Leads: Don Ingber, Peng Yin
Contact: Sam Inverso

Many disease-driving proteins remain difficult to drug because today’s screening tools are slow, costly, and prone to false positives. NanoDEX overcomes these limitations by rapidly measuring drug-protein interactions one molecule at a time, with the specificity to distinguish closely related proteins and the sensitivity to determine binding strength in a single pass. By generating high-quality binding data across vast chemical libraries, NanoDEX could help power AI-driven drug discovery for challenging therapeutic targets.

NeoSense: Ultrasensitive Detection of Sepsis in the Saliva of Neonates

Team Leads: Karan Malhotra, Justin C. Rolando
Principal Investigators: David R. Walt, Jill Maron
Contact: Gretchen Fougere

Neonatal sepsis is life-threatening and affects millions of newborns annually, but standard blood-culture testing is invasive, slow, and often inconclusive, resulting in unnecessary antibiotic treatments in many uninfected infants. NeoSense combines single-molecule protein detection with machine learning to analyze sepsis-associated biomarkers in tiny saliva samples. The non-invasive assay could help clinicians rapidly rule out infection, reduce antibiotic overuse, and spare newborns from repeated painful blood draws.

NERVE: A Novel Platform for Neurodegenerative Disease Diagnosis

Team Leads: Chih-Ping Mao, Gina Wang
Faculty Lead: David Walt
Contact: Gretchen Fougere

Emerging RNA-targeted therapies for neurodegenerative diseases need tests that can identify the right patients and show whether treatment is working. The NERVE team is advancing ORCA, an ultra-sensitive platform that detects rare, disease-linked RNA processing changes in cerebrospinal fluid and blood that are beyond the reach of conventional methods. By tracking abnormal RNA fragments, called cryptic exons, this minimally invasive technology could lay the foundation for a new class of RNA-based diagnostics to guide treatment decisions, track biological response, and accelerate development of next-generation therapies for neurodegenerative disease.

Nixe: Enhanced Environmentally Responsible Textile Performance Finishes

Team Lead: Tanya Shirman
Faculty Lead: Joanna Aizenberg
Contact: Alex Li

PFAS “forever chemicals” have long made textiles water-repellent, but their health risks, including cancer and reproductive health, and their persistence in the environment, are driving bans and calling for safer alternatives. Nixe is a PFAS-free, scalable textile coating platform that uses bioinspired silica structures and fluorine-free chemistry to create durable water repellency while preserving fabric breathability and flexibility.

RESTART: Reversal of Age-related Impairments in Bone Regeneration

Team Lead: Harkamal Jhajj
Faculty Leads: George Church, Georg Duda
Contact: Sam Inverso

As we age, a progressive decline in immune function impairs tissue repair and delays fracture healing — a clinical challenge felt most acutely by women after menopause. The RESTART platform identifies key molecular factors to rejuvenate regulatory T cells (Tregs), the vital immune cells responsible for attenuating chronic inflammation while actively supporting bone regeneration. By validating these candidate factors in donor-matched human cell cultures and humanized animal models, this dual-action approach aims to transform skeletal healing and pioneer a scalable toolkit for systemic immune rejuvenation.

THRIVE: Therapeutic Recovery of Injured Vascular Endothelium

Team Leads: Jennifer Bays, Eliz Amar-Lewis
Faculty Leads: Christopher Chen, Natalie Artzi
Contact: Gretchen Fougere

Damage to the endothelial barrier, the thin lining of blood vessels, can trigger vascular leak, clotting, and inflammation in deadly conditions such as sepsis, ARDS, and cardiovascular disease. The THRIVE team is advancing a therapeutic strategy that restores this barrier by delivering therapeutic RNA to vascular endothelium for sustained expression of a bioactive peptide resulting in endothelial protection. By strengthening injured blood vessels rather than only treating downstream symptoms, THRIVE could help halt or reverse disease progression in conditions with few targeted options.

First-year projects

B-CLARITY: B-cell targeted RNAi treatment for Autoimmunity

Team Leads: Chandrav De, Dima Ter-Ovanesyan
Faculty Leads: George Church, Donald Ingber
Contact: Vani Velamoor

Autoimmune diseases such as lupus and Sjögren’s syndrome are often treated by broadly depleting B cells, which can leave patients vulnerable to infection. B-CLARITY is developing a targeted RNAi therapy to inhibit the homing of autoreactive B cells to inflammatory lymphoid structures without dramatically depleting all B cells. Tested in human lymph node Organ Chips, the approach could enable a more precise, re-dosable treatment for chronic autoimmunity.

BEAM: Biologics to trEAt EndoMetriosis

Team Lead: Kasia Kready
Faculty Lead: Pamela Silver
Contact: Gretchen Fougere

Endometriosis affects ~10% of women and can cause debilitating pain. Existing therapies often have intolerable side effects and limited durability. BEAM is developing a non-hormonal biologic that targets endometriosis lesions without altering periods. It works by reprogramming the lesion microenvironment by inhibiting immune cells and targeting a key validated endometriosis factor. Using single-cell patient data and ML-guided protein design, we built proteins to disrupt key lesion-persistence mechanisms and to address multiple issues with existing treatment options.

BrainVEX: Engineered EVs for Brain Drug Delivery

Team Leads: Arek Melkonian, Chungmin Han
Faculty Lead: David Walt
Contacts:  Gretchen Fougere, Alex Li

The blood-brain barrier protects the brain from harmful substances, but it also prevents many medicines from reaching neurological targets. Existing brain-delivery technologies are generally limited in the kinds of therapeutic cargo they can transport. BrainVEX combines two Wyss-developed technologies: a scalable platform for engineering extracellular vesicles, which are natural nanoscale carriers, and brain-shuttle antibody fragments from the Wyss Brain Targeting Program. The team aims to provide a versatile delivery platform for neurodegenerative diseases, brain cancers, and rare neurological disorders.
*Supported by Harvard University’s Office of the Vice Provost for Research

Endobusters: T cell treatment and vaccination against endometriosis

Team Lead: Girija Goyal
Contact: Sam Inverso

Endometriosis affects roughly one in ten reproductive-age women, yet current treatments often rely on hormone suppression or repeat surgery and may not prevent recurrence. The Endobusters team is developing a personalized T cell–based approach that trains a patient’s own immune cells to recognize diseased endometriosis lesions, including their stress signals and mutation-linked features. Delivered locally into the pelvic cavity, the therapy could help clear existing lesions while building immune memory. 

ENDOxMAP: Mapping Endometriosis from Tissue to Organoid

Team Lead: Sandy Elmehrath
Faculty Leads: David Mooney, Juan Gnecco, David Walt, Peng Yin
Contact: Alex Li

Endometriosis is a chronic inflammatory disease that causes severe pelvic pain, infertility, and reduced quality of life. Progress toward early diagnostics and effective therapies is limited by the lack of validated biomarkers and preclinical models that reflect the diversity of lesion subtypes. The ENDOxMAP team is developing human-derived endometriosis organoid models and comparing them to native pathological tissue using state-of-the-art multi-omics technologies. This integrated approach will reveal disease-specific molecular features, providing a foundation for the discovery of diagnostic biomarkers and therapeutic targets to advance endometriosis care.

IMPACT: Interspecies Modeling for Predictive AI-driven Clinical Translation

Team Lead: Joshua Price
Faculty Leads: David Alvarez-Melis, David Mooney
Contact: Ally Chang

80% of drugs that show promise in animal studies fail in human trials, partly because preclinical models do not fully capture human biology. IMPACT uses generative AI and large-scale single-cell data from mouse models to predict human cellular responses with a confidence score. The framework could help researchers make better go/no-go decisions before initiating costly clinical trials, lowering failure rates and development costs.

Light-SCoPE: Single-cell Proteomics

Team Lead: Ninning Liu
Faculty Lead: Peng Yin
Contact: Ally Chang

Proteins are among the key functional drivers of cellular behavior, therapeutic response, and disease. Understanding these processes requires technologies that can map proteins with sufficient spatial detail, molecular depth, and scale. The Light-SCoPE team is developing a high-sensitivity single-cell proteomics platform to generate detailed protein maps of individual cells while preserving their spatial context in tissue. Designed for diverse tissue types, including cryo-banked human brain samples, these maps could uncover hidden disease biology, reveal new therapeutic opportunities, and generate context-rich datasets for AI-driven neurodegeneration research.
*Supported by Harvard University’s Office of the Vice Provost for Research 

Lymera: Aptamer-siRNA Therapeutics for Lyme Disease

Team Leads: Girija Goyal, Anastasia Ershova
Faculty Leads: William Shih, Donald Ingber
Contact: Sam Inverso

Some people with Lyme disease develop persistent and debilitating symptoms even after antibiotic treatment, yet there are no approved therapies that directly address the immune mechanisms underlying this long-term illness. Enabled by the first-ever Organ Chip model of the human adaptive immune response, the Lymera team is building gene-slicing RNA nanostructures to lower an immune-dampening protein in disease-relevant cells. This approach could restore protective immune responses without broadly weakening immunity and support precision RNA therapies for other chronic infectious and autoimmune diseases.
*Supported by Harvard University’s Office of the Vice Provost for Research

MenoSense: A Scalable At-Home Platform for Precision Women’s Health

Team Lead: Namrata Ramani
Faculty Leads: Natalie Artzi, Jim Collins
Clinical Lead: Kathryn Rexrode
Contact: Gretchen Fougere

During perimenopause, hormone levels can change rapidly and unpredictably, yet conventional blood tests provide only occasional snapshots. Because menopause care remains largely symptom-based, many women lack practical tools to understand how their hormone patterns relate to symptoms over time. We’re developing MenoSense, an at-home system combining a minimally invasive hydrogel microneedle patch, a compact reader to measure three key hormones, and a smartphone app that pairs hormone trends with reported symptoms. The platform could improve understanding of menopause and support more personalized treatment selection, monitoring, and management.
*Supported by Harvard University’s Office of the Vice Provost for Research 

NutriCirc: Sustainable Closed-Loop Microbial Food Production

Team Leads: Elizabeth Hann, Taylor Lanosky
Faculty Lead: George Church
Contact: Alex Li

Conventional agriculture depends on land, water, sunlight, and stable supply chains. To enable resilient food production where farming is impractical, NutriCirc replaces photosynthesis with electrochemical carbon fixation, using electricity and recycled waste to grow nutritious microbes in a closed loop. The platform could help address the global food crisis by reducing the land, water, and shipping footprint required to feed people. 

PODOprotect: Enhancing podocyte resiliency in diabetic kidney disease

Team Leads: Joel Moore, Suzie Xin Song
Faculty Leads: Di Feng, Donald Ingber
Contact: Ally Chang

Diabetic kidney disease is the leading cause of chronic kidney disease worldwide, and is largely driven by the diabetes-induced injury to podocytes, specialized cells in the kidney that play a critical role in blood filtration. PODOprotect targets a newly-identified process that makes these cells vulnerable to mechanical stress. By using human Kidney Organ Chips to test and optimize compounds that preserve podocyte resilience, the project could lay the groundwork for one of the first podocyte-targeting therapies for diabetic kidney disease.

REMODEL: Data-Driven, Multi-Organ Regeneration Modeling

Team Lead: Duncan Morgan
Faculty Leads: David Mooney, Georg Duda
Contact: Ally Chang

After an injury, organs activate similar biological programs, but some organs successfully complete the healing process while others become trapped in states of chronic inflammation or fibrosis. Current regenerative therapies are developed based on one organ and target at a time, making translation slow, costly, and difficult to generalize. REMODEL integrates gene-expression data across multiple organs to identify conserved stages of healing, determine how regeneration stalls, and predict which biological signals could restart recovery. This systematic approach could accelerate the discovery of regenerative treatments across many organs and settings of injury.
*Supported by Harvard University’s Office of the Vice Provost for Research

SPEEDR: Circular Upcycling of PET Waste into Compostable Bioplastics

Team Lead: Peter Nguyen
Faculty Lead: Jim Collins
Contact: Alex Li

Fossil fuel-derived materials and the resulting plastic waste are mounting environmental challenges, while biodegradable plastics remain expensive to produce. SPEEDR uses engineered microbes, solvent-assisted pretreatment, and enzymes to break down persistent plastic waste, absorb the resulting building blocks, and convert them into compostable PHA bioplastics. By turning low-value waste into higher-value materials, the platform could advance a more circular and sustainable plastics economy.

TARGET-ALD: Targeted AAVs Restoring Glial Expression Therapeutically for ALD

Team Lead: Alex Lenail
Faculty Lead: George Church
Clinical Co-Investigator: Patricia Musolino
Contact: Grant Zimmerman

Cerebral adrenoleukodystrophy, or ALD, is a rare and devastating neurological disease in which progressive brain damage can rapidly cause severe disability and death. TARGET-ALD is developing a gene therapy designed to reach the brain while limiting activity in the liver and elsewhere in the body. It combines engineered viral carriers, AI-designed switches that activate the therapeutic gene only in brain support cells involved in the disease, optimized delivery, and safeguards to reduce immune reactions. The team aims to develop a lead therapy for ALD and other diseases involving these cells.
*Supported by Harvard University’s Office of the Vice Provost for Research

Thermal-plex: Highly Adoptable and Rapid Spatial Transcriptomics

Team Lead: Jiyoun Jeong
Faculty Lead: Peng Yin
Contact: Sam Inverso

High-plex imaging can reveal where many biomarkers are located in cells within tissues, but current platforms are expensive, slow, and difficult to operate. Thermal-plex uses DNA probes that turn on at different temperatures, allowing many targets to be imaged without repeated fluidic-exchange steps or dedicated high-end instruments. This reagent-based method could enable researchers and clinicians to perform high-plex imaging with simplified workflow, reduced cost, and increased throughput, using widely installed standard microscopes.