While the COVID-19 pandemic forced the 2021 JPM meeting to occur remotely, Brown Technology Innovations seized the opportunity to meet with dozens of clients. The team highlighted 20 faculty members with transformative innovations and intellectual property in the health space. Those technologies fit into five biomedical categories:

• Better diagnosis. Harrison Bai and the Brown Baby Cry team led by Barry Lester are among those using machine learning and other advanced technologies to improve the speed and accuracy of disease diagnosis.
• Drug delivery. Researchers including Anita Shukla and Edith Mathiowitz focus on ways to ensure that medication most effectively reaches its intended target in the body.
• Laboratory test beds. Kareen Coulombe, Jeffrey Morgan, and Gregorio Valdez build new powerful platforms for laboratory testing, allowing new pharmaceuticals to be tested on three-dimensional bioengineered tissue.
• Unlocking neurodegenerative disease. A number of Brown faculty members concentrate on the detection and treatment of brain diseases afflicting millions of Americans, including Alzheimer’s disease and NPH.
• Novel treatments. Nikos Tapinos, Wafik El-Deiry, and Elena Oancea have developed creative treatments for conditions from obesity to COVID-19.

The BTI met with representatives from 45 companies, from biosciences venture capital firms like Northpond Ventures to pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and AstraZeneca to neuroscience-focused firms such as Neuron23.