Biomedical engineering design teams win big at HopStart 2024

Student teams from across the university competed for $45,000 in prizes at the 24th annual HopStart: Hopkins New Venture Challenge  held Friday, April 26, at the Inn at the Colonnade.

Fifty-five teams pitched their startup ideas over the event’s two rounds of competition. More than 20 judges, many of them Johns Hopkins alumni, evaluated those pitches and selected first-, second-, and third-place winners in each of the competition’s four categories.  The Pava Center for Entrepreneurship, A-Level Capital, and HopStone Capital  sponsored additional prizes.

Five undergraduate and two graduate teams from the biomedical engineering department walked away with prizes, including in the competition’s main categories: Medical Technology and Life Sciences I and II. First-place teams received $5,000, second-place teams won $3,000, and third-place teams won $1,000.

Medical Technology and Life Science Ventures I

First Place: Team OcuSound, an at-home intraocular pressure sensor to detect glaucoma progression. Team members: Maria Giannakopoulos, Alex Kroumov, Hyun Seo Lee, Elliott Leow, Ben Miller, Ashish Nalla, Valerie Wong, Nancy Yan. 

2nd Place: UrInControl, an over-the-counter pessary for stress urinary incontinence in females. Team members: Alex Chao, Elizabeth Kim, Kathy Liu, Nina Nair, Aadit Walia, Lily Liu, Michelle Lu

3rd Place: TenoPedics, a novel surgical space expansion system for arthroscopic biceps tenodesis. Team members: Sofia Arboleda, Veatriki Benou, Nikhil Choudhary, Sandhya Ganesh, Ansh Goyal, Rishi Koneru, Sneha Raj, Eric Simon

Medical Technology and Life Science Ventures II

First Place: Team SinuStim (CBID MSE Team), a wearable, portable neuromodulation device for the treatment of chronic rhinosinusitis. Team members: Abhiram Cherukupalli, Sandhya Tiku, Roanne Yehia.

Second Place: Fetal Therapy Technologies, a novel port system to mitigate membrane rupture in fetal therapy procedures. Team members: Selena Shirkin, Mariah Snelson, Eric McAlexander, Daniel Lewis, Jonathan Wu, Ayeeshi Poosarla, Gloria Kalnitskaya, Alice Yu.

The Pava Center for Entrepreneurship Award

Glyph AI, a platform that seeks to overcome healthcare communication inequities using automatically generated images for translating hospital discharge information. Team Members: Payton Barnes, Austin Dai, Linika Goel, Sophia Hibner, Sangeeta Koilada, William Sun, Ria Thakur, Samhita Vasu.

SinuStim (described above)

Each team received $500.

The HopStone Capital Award

ReNuNerve (CBID MSE Team), a wearable device to correct gait for diabetic neuropathy patients by providing sensory feedback. Team Members: Rida Amjed, Sainkhuu Enkh-Otgon, Shirley Lin, Fujia Zheng

The team received $3,000.