Breakthrough Innovation Wins 2025 MESH Disruptive Innovation Prize

Mass General Brigham MESH Incubator awards $5,000 to bold solution improving patient care

The MESH Incubator at Mass General Brigham has awarded the 2025 MESH Disruptive Innovation Prize to Sofia Paschenti for her work with Microvitality, a company developing a non-invasive diagnostic capsule designed to improve analysis of the small intestine microbiome.

Microvitality addresses a longstanding gap in gastrointestinal diagnostics by enabling direct, non-invasive sampling of the small intestine, a region largely inaccessible with standard methods. The 3D-printed capsule features a pH-sensitive coating and self-locking mechanism that prevents contamination from other parts of the digestive tract, allowing for precise, uncontaminated sampling. This approach may support more accurate diagnosis of conditions like SIBO and IBS, which are often underdiagnosed due to current testing limitations.

Learn more: www.microvitalitybio.com

Presented annually at MESH Core, the official healthcare innovation course of Mass General Brigham, the $5,000 prize recognizes one project that demonstrates exceptional potential to disrupt healthcare and improve patient outcomes. Finalists pitch their ideas to a panel of healthcare investors and leaders.

This year’s finalists included:

• Albert Tai – Lessons Learned From Implementing Innovative On-Call Scheduling and Secure Messaging to Replace Pagers and Phone Calls for Critical Communication
• Amir Arif, PhD – Transforming Preclinical Drug Development: From Animal Testing to Patient-Specific Digital Twins
• Anthony Samir, MBBCH – AI GUIDE: The AI Guided Ultrasound Intervention Device
• Denise Cuddeback, LSSBB – Transforming Patient Access and Physician Capacity with Predictive Analytics: The Power of PanelytxTM
• Eirini Schlosser, MSc – Automating EMR Chart Review with Synapsis AI, Surpassing Clinician-Level Accuracy
• Gitte Pedersen – RNA AI Platform for Next-Generation Cures
• Grayson Armstrong – EyeQ
• Hani Eskandari, PhD – Autonomous Ultrasound as a Wearable Patch
• Jim Wu, MD, MBA – Continuous Monitoring of Microvascular Regeneration in Diabetic Wound Healing
• Jocelyn Campbell, MS, MPH – AI-Driven Personalized Life Planning & Emergency Management
• Pischa (Tulip) Jettakun, MBA – Link Health: AI-Driven Solutions for Access to Essential Benefits
• Rachna Dhamija, PhD – Agentic AI Platform for Connected Care
• Sarah Kimmins, PhD – Precision Health for Male Infertility
• Shijun Li, PhD – Targeting RBM20 to Treat Heart Failure with Preserved Ejection Fraction
• Sofia Paschenti, MSc – Ingestible Capsule for Microbiome Profiling in GI Diagnostics
• Thaddeus Fulford-Jones, PhD, MS – Radial: AI Decision Support for Value-Based Care
• Varun Singh, MD – Image-Guided Platform Delivery Device for Type 1 Diabetes

The MESH Disruptive Innovation Prize underscores the program’s commitment to accelerating bold, practical solutions at the intersection of medicine, engineering, science, and health.

About the MESH Incubator

The MESH Incubator is an in-house innovation and entrepreneurship center at Mass General Brigham and Harvard Medical School, established in 2016. As the first incubator of its kind embedded within a hospital system, MESH supports clinicians, researchers, engineers, and students through hands-on project development, company formation, innovation training, and community-building. Its flagship offering, the MESH Core Innovation Bootcamp, is the first system-wide healthcare innovation curriculum and has enrolled over 200 investigators to date. MESH also hosts the Innovation MESH Network, the official Mass General Brigham innovation platform co-developed with Mass General Brigham Innovation. For more information, visit meshincubator.org.

About Mass General Brigham

Mass General Brigham is an integrated academic health care system, uniting great minds to solve the hardest problems in medicine for our communities and the world. Mass General Brigham connects a full continuum of care across a system of academic medical centers, community and specialty hospitals, a health insurance plan, physician networks, community health centers, home care, and long-term care services. Mass General Brigham is a nonprofit organization committed to patient care, research, teaching, and service to the community. In addition, Mass General Brigham is one of the nation’s leading biomedical research organizations with several Harvard Medical School teaching hospitals. For more information, please visit massgeneralbrigham.org.