New Impact Grant recipients aim to translate their research into real world solutions

Launched in 2023, our BioEnginuity Impact Grant helps STEM doctoral students aim their research toward the greater social good. The grant offers students the flexibility to reimagine their research in interdisciplinary directions, commercialize their technology, or pursue industry partnerships, all with the goal of solving the world’s most pressing problems. Awardees are also supported by extracurricular offerings, including workshops, networking, and mentoring opportunities. 

Our fourth cohort of fellows has demonstrated a clear commitment to tackling global challenges through collaborative research. Meet the grant winners below:

Andres Dextre Chavez — Point-of-care detection of lead using CRISPR-Cas enzymes

When COVID-19 hit, Andres saw the field of diagnostics expand rapidly for disease detection. Though the novel workflows were translatable, they never made it to the realm of environmental detection. Andres’s team noticed this crucial gap and began adapting the methods to apply to their work on environmental pollutants.

The resulting technology is a point-of-care method that can detect lead in drinking water quickly and reliably. The method uses DNA molecules called aptamers that bind to a molecule of interest (the recognition part of the test), and a protein called Cas13 that only generates fluorescence if the aptamer “finds” the target molecule (the signal part of the test). Andres is currently in the proof-of-concept stage, and planning to run a pilot with a local school in Oakland. He anticipates using the grant’s support to scale and commercialize his technology so it can adequately address the problem of lead leaching. He looks forward to contributing to the field of diagnostics and opening new doors for other researchers.

Matthew Giammar — Protein structure validation and refinement at scale in the AI era

A general understanding of the protein structure-function relationship remains elusive, despite its importance to therapeutic innovations. Though protein structure prediction is booming thanks to the help of machine learning, the potential advances are slowed by a need to validate structures one by one. Matthew is addressing this bottleneck by using cryo-electron microscopy (cryoEM). In cryoEM, molecules are flash-frozen in a thin layer of ice, then imaged with an electron beam to produce “noisy” 2D snapshots of molecules at unknown angles. His method simulates what a predicted structure could look like from every orientation, then scores those simulations against the real image, quantifying the accuracy of predicted structures at scale.

Matthew plans to use Impact Grant funding to develop a platform that allows scientists to validate protein predictions without deep expertise. This platform could contribute towards a system that’s able to leverage protein structure and function prediction at scale, unlocking the potential of protein design in support of food production, medicine, and more. He is pursuing commercialization in the hope of helping solve humanity’s challenges with biology.

Jeremy Lowe — Advancing the field of in-line chlorination to expand access to safe drinking water, reduce human exposure to enteric pathogens and antibiotic resistance, and improve health globally

In many parts of the world, there is low access to safe drinking water due to untreated waterborne pathogens. Part of the problem is the paradigm of water treatment, which was developed for urban settings with centralized drinking water and doesn’t translate well to rural areas with diverse water infrastructure. Jeremy and his team are addressing this problem by deploying passive in-line chlorination technologies in low-resource settings to disinfect drinking water. 

These devices work without requiring electricity, daily operators, or high installation costs — they attach to existing pipes, ready to dose chlorine as the water passes through. Jeremy co-founded a nonprofit organization, Mangrove Water, that utilizes this technology and collaborates with international governments and nonprofits to expand safe drinking water access. He considers himself a public health engineer, and chose to pursue water treatment as an impactful avenue to improving public health. This grant will offer him the flexibility to continue adapting his technology based on community feedback. It will also help him focus on scaling to support more infrastructure cases: he plans to apply his technology next to manual hand pumps, for which there are currently no compatible water treatment technologies.

Maya Overton — Ground Truth: Paired Single-Cell RNA-Protein Tools for Scalable Biological Data Generation

In the new age of digital biology and artificial intelligence, simulations of how the body functions at a cellular and molecular scale are being generated in record time. While these representations may be good in certain contexts, the current single-cell data they work from is insufficient for building high-accuracy, global models. Maya is engineering a tool that can help complete the “biological picture” by isolating individual cells, examining both the RNA and proteins inside, and analyzing how they affect cell function and state.

In creating this technology, Maya prioritized removing barriers for replicability, such as high cost, specialized equipment requirements and specialized operator expertise. This serves one of her passions: the democratization of precision medicine. She approaches her work with an interdisciplinary lens — her background in economics and biology taught her to consider the impacts of a technology all the way from research to trade. She plans to use Impact Grant funds to create a robust end-to-end tool that can feed into a computational pipeline and be used in different contexts. Her ultimate goal is to commercialize and share the research across academic and industrial labs.