Nurtur was a 2023 IDEAS team. Nurtur is an AI-powered postpartum depression prediction tool that utilizes telehealth to support parents through pregnancy, birth, and postpartum.
Dheera Ananthakrishnan, a Friend of the PKG, is an academic orthopaedic spine surgeon, philanthropist and entrepreneur.
Credit: Jonathan Stern, Courtesy of SHIP
An MIT startup’s personalized heart implants, designed to help prevent strokes, won this year’s MIT Sloan Healthcare Innovation Prize (SHIP) on Thursday.
Spheric Bio’s implants grow inside the body once injected, to fit within the patient’s unique anatomy. This could improve stroke prevention because existing implants are one-size-fits-all devices that can fail to fully block the most at-risk regions, leading to leakages and other complications.
“Our mission is to transform stroke prevention by building personalized medical devices directly inside patients’ hearts,” said Connor Verheyen PhD ’23, a postdoc in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST), who made the winning pitch.
Verheyen’s co-founders are MIT Associate Professor Ellen Roche and HST postdoc Markus Horvath PhD ’22.
Spheric Bio was one of seven teams that pitched their solution at the event, which was held in the MIT Media Lab and kicked off the MIT Sloan Healthcare and BioInnovations Conference.
Spheric took home the event’s $25,000 first-place prize. The second-place prize went to nurtur, another MIT alumnus-founded startup, that has developed an artificial intelligence-powered platform designed to detect and prevent postpartum depression. Last summer, nurtur participated in the delta v startup accelerator program organized by the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship.
The audience choice award was given to Merunova, which is using AI and MRI diagnostics to improve the diagnosis and treatment of spinal cord disorders. Merunova was co-founded by Dheera Ananthakrishnan, a former spine surgeon who completed an executive MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2023.