Team Updates

Maria Artunduaga’s Mission to Manage Chronic Lung Disease

On February 26, 2018, Maria Artunduaga had a eureka moment that medical entrepreneurs dream of. In the office of UCSF Professor Mehrdad Arjomandi, she was soliciting advice about a wearable prototype she had developed to monitor oxygen in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

ZestBio Continues Innovation with Waste-based Products

Early in 2017, Ryan Protzko, then a doctoral student in biochemistry at UC Berkeley, was working on research to turn orange peels into eco-friendly bottles and contacted a citrus juicer in California’s Central Valley. Would the company be able to spare some orange peels? Yes, responded the representative, the juicer could

DOST— Fostering Early Childhood Development in India

Early years of childhood form the basis of intelligence, personality, social behavior, and capacity to learn and nurture oneself. Increasingly, child development researchers are also finding that brain development during the first eight years is the most rapid, with children who receive attention in their early years

VIDI—Another Way to See Surgery

Basic surgeries are far from basic. They require approximately 50 tools, which take about 2 minutes each for an experienced technician to clean. Operations in a trauma unit require as many as 400 tools. And in both environments, surgical tools can be easily misplaced, thrown away, or

MarHub: A Technology to Help Refugees Navigate Asylum

In 2016, as Sarrah Nomanbhoy was starting her MBA at the Haas School of Business, the refugee crisis in Europe was in its second peak year and over a million applicants applied for asylum to the EU.
Nomanbhoy, a native Californian, had been watching

How WhatsApp and SMS are being used to save the lives of babies in Africa

To date, 2012 Big Ideas winner Jacaranda Health has provided maternal care to 30,000+ women and delivered 3,000+ babies, transforming childbirth survival rates in Kenya. Most recently they have begun leveraging technologies such SMS to make progress towards improving maternal health of even more low-income mothers and their newborns.