The Fall 2025 Penn I-Corps cohort recently completed its program, featuring diverse teams from multiple schools, including Penn Medicine, Penn Engineering, Penn Arts & Sciences, and Wharton. Ten teams completed the program, and 26 individuals received valuable training in entrepreneurship. Through rigorous customer discovery, teams refined their ideas and identified key challenges and opportunities. Below is an overview of their learning trajectories. Read about each team below:
Devices
Limb Ischemia Monitor (LIM)
Team Composition: Faculty and graduate students from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the School of Engineering and Applied Science
Description: Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) is a life-saving therapy for cardiac failure but can lead to limb ischemia and amputations, especially in pediatric settings. LIMB is a real-time optical device that detects limb ischemia in ECMO patients by measuring oxygenation and blood flow. It enables early intervention, reducing amputations and complications. Designed for ECMO teams at CHOP and Penn, the Neurometabolic Optics Monitor (NOM) combines accuracy and practicality to improve outcomes and lower healthcare costs.
Learning Outcome: The critical unmet need is reliable, real-time monitoring, with adoption driven by hospital leadership prioritizing workflow efficiency and reduced staff burden.
Precision Guided Interventions
Team Composition: Two faculty members from the Perelman School of Medicine and an MD-PhD Candidate from the School of Engineering
Description: Solid tumor treatment is limited by frequent disease recurrence, forcing patients to endure multiple therapies with suboptimal outcomes and severe side effects. COPE-GENE is a percutaneous platform combining electroablation and electroporation-based gene therapy for the treatment of solid tumors. It enables efficient tumor destruction, payload delivery, and immune activation in a single minimally invasive procedure, improving efficacy and reducing costs for interventional oncology.
Learning Outcome: Streamlining treatment protocol, achieving homogeneous therapeutic distribution, and leveraging the expanding treatment armamentarium are of critical concern to interventional radiologists treating liver cancer.
Visi Health
Team Composition: Faculty, a postdoctoral fellow, and a clinical research coordinator from the Perelman School of Medicine
Description: Visi is a portable, telemedicine-enabled headset providing both anterior and posterior eye imaging for medical facilities that lack staff with ophthalmologic expertise. It reduces costly transfers and patient wait times, enhances diagnostic accuracy, and integrates smoothly into existing workflows, improving efficiency and care quality.
Learning Outcome: The core unmet needs are lack of OPH training, transportation barriers, purchasing decisions, and access to high-quality diagnostic imaging, expanding our focus to include urgent care centers.
Therapeutics
Linfa Therapeutics
Team Composition: Alum and a postdoctoral fellow from the Perelman School of Medicine
Description: T-cell therapies revolutionize cancer care, yet many patients still relapse from T-cell exhaustion. Linfa Therapeutics boosts T-cell persistence and durability by combining pharmaceutical and nutraceutical strategies.
Learning Outcome: Inconsistent checkpoint inhibitor responses and reduced T-cell fitness drive unmet need. Clinicians seek a low-toxicity, oral adjunct to improve durability without further workflow burden.
Myaab Therapeutics
Team Composition: Graduate students and faculty from the School of Engineering and the Wharton School
Description: Many existing cancer treatments anchor payloads to tumor cells via overexpressed tumor antigens, limiting their effectiveness against heterogeneous tumors with unknown or variable antigen expression. Myaab is a personalized cancer therapy using tumor-derived autoantibodies functionalized with therapeutic payloads to target multiple tumor antigens simultaneously. This method minimizes immune response, reduces costs, and allows fast turnaround for post-surgical cancer treatment.
Learning Outcome: Pancreatic tumors are poor candidates and tumor tissue is limited after neoadjuvant therapy. The team pivots to explore ovarian cancer, targeting gynecologic oncologists and prioritizing logistically feasible, low-cost personalized treatment to reduce recurrence.
Diagnostics
Pennsieve
Team Composition: A director-level staff from the Perelman School of Medicine and an ELITE Entrepreneurial Fellow from the Wharton School
Description: Pennsieve is a platform that enables pharmaceutical companies to design smarter clinical trials by predicting which patients are most likely to respond to treatment. By analyzing their immune profiles, Pennsieve’s approach de-risks clinical trial designs and improves the probability of success.
Learning Outcome: The real bottleneck is predictive biomarkers, not recruitment. Pennsieve pivoted to helping sponsors predict which patients will respond before launching expensive trials, increasing overall probability of trial success.
Eclipse Neurotech
Team Composition: An ELITE Entrepreneurial Fellow from the Wharton School and a Research Assistant from the School of Arts and Sciences
Description: It is challenging to determine appropriate sedation levels for dissociative anesthesia. Eclipse Neurotech offers a portable EEG software platform that computes a real-time brain stability index to quantify sedation and awareness. It enables drug-agnostic anesthesia titration, improves safety in OR and ICU settings, and functions with dissociative agents where conventional monitors fail, providing greater precision in consciousness monitoring.
Learning Outcome: Whereas our initial focus was on pediatric settings, we found out that problems in current anesthesia neuromonitoring practices occur most prominently in adults. We now seek to address anesthesia-driven complications and to enable personalized anesthesia at large.
IT
Sentria Health
Team Composition: Three undergraduates from the School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering
Description: An AI-powered procurement platform for hospitals and clinics that optimizes purchasing, reduces waste, and increases operational efficiency for specialty medications. It integrates with billing and EHR systems, forecasts demand, flags inefficiencies, and supports a compliant secondary marketplace for unused inventory.
Learning Outcome: The dominant pains are payer-mandated bagging rules and incorrect upstream routing, compounded by siloed pharmacy, supply chain, and revenue cycle operations. We pivoted to focus on routing logic, reimbursement-focused workflows, and real-time inventory visibility across sites.
Materials
Vytrina (Cytabond)
Team Composition: An ELITE Fellow from the Wharton School and a Masters’ Student from the School of Engineering working on technology developed by SEAS faculty.
Description: Vytrina (Cytabond) is a reversible hydrogel adhesive designed for painless and secure cranial wound closure in pediatric patients. It combines strong adhesion under moisture with biocompatibility and gentle removal, reducing pain, hair loss, and infection risk while improving healing outcomes and patient comfort in neurosurgical and dermatologic procedures.
Learning Outcome: The larger unmet need is a stronger, effective tissue adhesive that reduces irritation and infection and enables painless removal, expanding our focus to ECG/EEG & ICU/PICU leads.
Digital Health
Nonstop
Team Composition: A team of two undergraduate students from the School of Engineering and the School of Arts and Sciences
Description: SmartRun is a mobile app that uses live traffic data to generate stop-free running routes for city runners, maintaining consistent pacing and improving training quality. It offers a race-like experience within urban settings while providing opportunities for ad revenue and brand partnerships.
Learning Outcome: Runners primarily want uninterrupted, mentally effortless runs and help discovering new routes without planning. We now focus on eliminating unknowns and providing curated, low-interruption routes to help run clubs explore new parts of the city safely and efficiently.