From diagnostics and therapeutics to sustaining life on our planet, 16 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 the 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 received 56 high-quality Validation Project submissions and ultimately selected 16 for funding. The review process included internal screening, detailed external review with experts in the various fields, including our Wyss Mentor Hive members, and final decisions based on scientific strength, commercial viability, innovativeness, likelihood of achieving technology validation, and portfolio balance. The cohort also signals where translational research is moving: 43% of the selected projects involve collaborations across different labs, nearly half use AI, and six 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.