After months of fierce competitors, Lilypad Health has been topped this 12 months’s InVenture Prize winners. The group’s invention, an at-home, non-invasive menstrual blood screening device, proposes an alternative choice to conventional practices in ladies’s well being whereas making testing extra accessible to the uninsured.

Teammates Rhea Prem, Netra Gandhi, and Ethan Damiani have identified one another since their first 12 months and launched into this transformative journey as a capstone venture. Recognizing the numerous hole in entry to care and preventive well being measures, particularly in ladies’s well being, the group got down to develop an answer that may empower people with larger management over their well being.

Lilypad Health presents much less invasive testing for a spread of essential well being indicators, together with HPV, cervical most cancers, HbA1C, hormones and fertility well being, PCOS, and endometriosis. By enabling ladies to conduct these assessments within the consolation and privateness of their very own properties, Lilypad Health is poised to revolutionize the best way ladies strategy their well being and wellness.

Their efforts are usually not nearly creating a product — the group is actively working to interrupt down stigmas surrounding menstruation and period-related well being points, fostering a extra open and inclusive dialogue round ladies’s well being. Their work has been acknowledged with an AIDS Research Award and was featured in Women’s Health earlier this 12 months.

With two prototypes already in growth and testing underway for preserved biomarkers for pattern presentation, Lilypad Health is making important strides towards bringing their progressive answer to the plenty. And they aren’t the one ones who really feel their invention is urgently wanted — the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted the group a patent acceleration certificates and they’re at present in talks with menstrual pad producers about partnering to make their product much more extensively accessible. When requested what they might do with the $20,000 InEnterprise Prize cash, Rhea replied, “Work on getting our product to market.”

Lilypad Health’s imaginative and prescient of changing into a number one ladies’s well being firm is effectively inside attain. In addition to the award cash, the group has gained a coveted spot in Georgia Tech’s CREATE-X Startup Launch, a 12-week summer season program the place they may obtain teaching and mentorship from skilled entrepreneurs and have the chance to pitch their mannequin to traders. 

You can be taught extra about Lilypad Health and their transformative invention on their website.

Second place and $10,000 went to Makr Papr, a group of laptop science, laptop engineering, and mechanical engineering college students who’ve developed an progressive, patent-pending know-how that guarantees to exchange identify tags and occasion apps at conferences with an easy-to-use, tap-and-go printable paper.

“We want to show others that it doesn’t matter where you come from or your background,” says the group. “If we can do it, you can do it.”

The People’s Choice Award, chosen via viewers voting in the course of the stay present, went to group Candor. Comprising 4 laptop science majors, this group invented what they name a “Constituent Relationship Management (CRM)” platform that goals to make “democratic participation more accessible and effective for everyone.” The platform presents a streamlined reporting and monitoring course of to expedite infrastructure upkeep for metropolis governments and municipalities.

Learn extra about the entire 2024 finalists on the InVenture Prize web site, and for those who missed the stay present, verify again for a hyperlink to the recording.