The Ignition Awards highlight “BU’s role as a growing innovation hub,” says Melinda Shockley, BU’s executive director of faculty entrepreneurship. Photo by Above Summit for Boston University Photography

Accolades

From Better Batteries to Improved Cartilage Repair, BU Ignition Award Winners Aim for Real-World Impact

Annual honors support innovative Boston University research projects preparing to leap from lab to commercialization

If you’ve ever waited impatiently for your phone to get enough charge to make a call or your electric car to take on enough juice for a run to the store, you’ve come up against the limits of modern batteries. They’re better than ever—but still not quite good enough for all the demands we place on them. They take too long to charge and run out of power too quickly.

A Boston University engineering team is working on a better battery technology they say could charge faster and last longer—and they just won a BU Ignition Award to help take the tech from the lab to your phone or car. The annual Ignition Awards honor innovative BU projects that are ready to make the move toward commercialization, from the research phase to consumer use.

“Many years of research and effort by multiple team members put us in the position to build prototypes of our advanced battery technology,” says Jörg Werner, a BU College of Engineering assistant professor of mechanical engineering and leader of the award-winning battery team. “The Ignition Award is both a recognition of that team effort, as well as support and guidance to translate the invention to the next step on the path to real-world impact.”

Given by BU Technology Development within the University’s Office of Research, the awards come with financial backing, as well as a dedicated advisory committee to provide expertise, mentoring, and oversight to help projects navigate any commercialization challenges. Alongside Werner’s group, there were six other winning teams this year, with projects pushing to improve disease detection, build more sustainable data centers, and create targeted therapies and medicines.

“The program highlights BU’s role as a growing innovation hub and serves as a bridge between academic discovery and real-world solutions,” says Melinda Shockley, BU’s executive director of faculty entrepreneurship. “What really excites me is seeing how the project teams bring fresh thinking from different backgrounds and departments across the University—chemistry, engineering, business, medicine, data science—to solve critical, real-world problems.”

The Winners

Machine Learning for Designing Better Drugs

The project: Combining advanced machine learning tools and innovative chemical thinking to design new types of medicines.

Team leads: Adrian Whitty, College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of chemistry, and Xuezhou (Jack) Zhang, Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences assistant professor of computing and data sciences.

Potential impact: “It is well established that macrocyclic compounds—molecules containing a ring of at least 12 atoms—can have advantageous properties as oral drugs,” according to Whitty and Zhang. Their work could make it possible to reliably design macrocyclic compounds that can be taken by mouth, “addressing a key current obstacle in macrocycle drug discovery.” They say the Ignition Award’s “resources, recognition, and the business advice and assistance that is integral to the program, will be invaluable in helping us move our idea forward toward eventual commercialization, as well as providing enhanced educational and training opportunities to the graduate students involved.”

Targeted mRNA Therapies

The project: Engineered enzymes that make sure mRNA medicines only act in the cells they’re intended for, not any cell they land in.

Team leads: John T. Ngo, ENG associate professor of biomedical engineering, and Alex Marzilli (ENG’24), ENG postdoctoral researcher, biomedical engineering.

Potential impact: When used in a medicine, the team’s engineered enzymes would “remain quiet until they detect a unique molecular ‘signature,’ such as a marker found only in tumor cells,” says Ngo. “When that signal appears, the enzymes activate and fine-tune the therapeutic mRNA. By linking therapy to cell identity, we can improve the efficacy of mRNA medicines, potentially broadening the ways mRNA can be used to treat diseases like cancer. Over time, this could enable smarter, more precise treatments for liver cancers, autoimmune disorders, and other diseases that demand highly targeted therapies.”

Engineered Cartilage and Long-Term Tissue Repair

The project: A drug delivery system to help long-term tissue repair.

Team leads: Michael Albro, ENG assistant professor of mechanical engineering and of materials science and engineering, and Mark Grinstaff, a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor.

Potential impact: The team is developing a technology that acts like a scaffold for promoting cartilage repair. “With surgical treatments only offering temporary relief and no current drug treatment options,” according to BU Technology Development, “this therapeutic approach has the potential to promote cartilage regeneration in the treatment of cartilage injuries and prevention of osteoarthritis.”

More Efficient, Higher Quality Tissue Imaging

The project: A patented technology to reduce histopathology cost, while also improving diagnoses and reducing environmental impact.

Team lead: Selim Ünlü, ENG Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Potential impact: Histopathology, examining tissue samples for disease, usually involves a couple of complex steps—including embedding the samples with paraffin for preservation and slicing, then removing the paraffin (deparaffinization) again for testing. Ünlü’s team has developed a way to fast-forward the histopathology process and potentially improve results. His group has patented an innovation that allows for high-contrast imaging of tissue sections without deparaffinization. “With the successful implementation of the proposed technology, tissue slides, once cut, could be immediately imaged—without toxic and largely irreversible deparaffinization and histochemical staining steps—and evaluated by the pathologist,” says Ünlü. “For a daring idea to replace a well-established standard, it is great to have BU Ignition support to get convincing data.”

A New Way to View Tiny Particles

The project: A new microscopy technology that can identify the chemical fingerprints of bionanoparticles.

Team leads: Ji-Xin Cheng, ENG professor of biomedical engineering and of electrical and computer engineering, and Qing Xia, postdoctoral fellow, biomedical engineering.

Potential impact: The technology could give an unprecedented view of the chemical makeup of nanoparticles used in antivirals and other drugs, as well as improve screening of cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases. The team’s infrared technology measures the light scattering from a particle, as well as heating it up so it expands: “You can tune the infrared light so that you can get the fingerprint spectroscopy, a fingerprint of this particle,” says Cheng, “and from there, we can know the major chemicals in the particle.”

Energy Efficient Data Centers

The project: Developing optimization and software methods that allow data centers to flexibly manage power consumption without denting performance.

Team lead: Ayse Coskun, ENG professor of electrical and computer engineering and systems engineering.

Potential impact: “The next step is to build prototypes that can operate across a broad set of hardware for high-performance computing and AI workloads,” says Coskun. “Winning the Ignition Award is both an honor and a catalyst. It will help validate our vision of data centers as flexible, sustainable grid assets and helps us move our methods from research into real-world practice.”

Fast-Charging, High-Energy Batteries

The project: A fundamental structural redesign of battery cell architecture using advanced microscale fabrication methods.

Team lead: Jörg Werner, ENG assistant professor of mechanical engineering.

Potential impact: “Our technology addresses the long-lasting energy-power conundrum of traditional batteries,” says Werner. “Specifically, by substantially reducing the internal resistance of the battery, if successful, our technology will mitigate the slow charging times for high-energy batteries in electric vehicles, for example, or the short lifetime of high-power batteries in power tools and advanced electronics.”