Moving research from lab to market to maximize impact

From a smartphone app that supports mental health to a new platform for rapid drug development, Clemson University researchers are working to push numerous innovations to market to maximize their societal impact.

Clemson research teams have joined the National Science Foundation (NSF) I-Corps Regional Cohort at Clemson University this spring to identify pathways to commercialize their products. Innovations have applications in health care, manufacturing, smart mobility and workforce training.

The NSF I‑Corps program guides them through the customer discovery process to better understand the markets and real‑world needs tied to their innovations. As part of the NSF I‑Corps Regional Program, participants gain hands‑on entrepreneurial training designed to strengthen commercialization pathways and prepare teams for future national-level opportunities.

“Brilliant people are pushing the boundaries of science and discovery every day at Clemson to solve real-world problems. We are working hard to help them maximize the impact of that work by guiding I-Corps teams on a customer discovery journey over seven weeks to identify industry opportunities and bridge the gap from idea to impact,” said Mark Roth, I-Corps liaison and senior business development associate with the Clemson University Research Foundation (CURF).

The following teams are participating the NSF I-Corps Regional Cohort this spring:

InnerAtlas®

• Kaileigh Byrne, associate professor, Department of Psychology

InnerAtlas is a customizable mental‑health app that combines evidence‑based cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) with an empathetic, human‑like virtual therapeutic coach to deliver engaging, scalable support for college students. Unlike typical AI chatbot apps, it uses a curated database of thousands of human‑generated, CBT‑aligned responses — enhanced by interactive journeys, mood tracking, and adaptive learning — to promote sustained emotional wellness and personalized guidance.

Fly2Pharma

• Trudy Mackay, director, Institute for Human Genetics
• Anurag Chaturvedi, postdoctoral fellow, Institute for Human Genetics
• John Poole, bioinformatician, Institute for Human Genetics

Fly2Pharma transforms Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit flies, into a high‑throughput, cost‑effective platform for early drug safety and efficacy screening by leveraging its 75% gene homology with humans and the well‑characterized Drosophila Genetic Reference Panel. This innovation enables rapid, genetically diverse and highly predictive preclinical testing that reduces research and development risk by identifying toxicity and efficacy issues far earlier than traditional models.

AncientGeneBiotech

• Alex Feltus, professor, Department of Genetics and Biochemistry
• Emily Casanova, assistant professor, Department of Psychiatry, St. Louis University

A‑DAC is a modular ancestry‑classification algorithm that uses a unique panel of Neandertal‑derived, ancestry‑informative SNPs to reveal deep population structure and evolutionary history that conventional markers often miss. Its three‑phase machine‑learning system adapts dynamically to each dataset’s genetic diversity, enabling highly accurate superpopulation ancestry labeling across research biobanks and clinical sequencing cohorts.

Visual Scanning Trainer (VST)

• Rakesh Gangadharaiah, postdoctoral fellow, Department of Automotive Engineering
• Johnell Brooks, professor, School of Mechanical and Automotive Engineering

The Visual Scanning Trainer is a portable, tablet-integrated system that improves visual scanning and situational awareness through customizable cube-based visual exercises. Designed for high-risk occupations and individuals with mobility or balance challenges, it provides adaptive training to enhance safe navigation in real-world environments.

Smart Glove

• Laine Mears, director, School of Mechanical and Automotive Engineering
• Vinita Jansari, research assistant professor, School of Mechanical and Automotive Engineering
• Flanagan Waldherr, graduate assistant, Department of Automotive Engineering
• Jack Hobbs, graduate assistant, Department of Automotive Engineering

This smart glove integrates motion, force, sound and biometric sensors to simultaneously assess both task performance and human stress or fatigue in high‑risk work environments. It provides an unobtrusive, real‑time picture of worker readiness and performance that traditional single‑modality gloves cannot capture.

DriveX

• Yunyi Jia, professor, School of Mechanical and Automotive Engineering
• Rongyao “Tony” Wang, graduate research assistant, Department of Automotive Engineering
• Haotian Su, postdoctoral fellow, Department of Automotive Engineering
• Jin Zhou, Entrepreneurial Advisor

The DriveX enables faster, safer and cheaper vehicle testing and data collection through reproducing scenarios in mixed reality. This system merges real vehicles, real environments and virtual scenarios to enable realistic Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomy testing as well as data collection. It allows rapid scenario creation for both human and autonomous drivers, saves time and cost to validate ADAS/autonomy developments, generates sufficient realistic data to train vehicle AI models, and provides quick validations for software updates.

Laser Speckle Dermatoscope

• Tong Ye, professor, Department of Bioengineering
• Wan Shen “Billy” Hee, postdoctoral fellow, Department of Bioengineering

This team has a handheld multimodal dermatoscope that combines digital dermoscopy with laser speckle contrast imaging to capture both skin structure and real‑time blood‑flow patterns, improving diagnostic accuracy for vascularized lesions. Its portable, integrated imaging system provides clearer, non‑invasive evaluation of skin abnormalities while helping reduce unnecessary biopsies.

The Acoustic Scrubber

• John R. Saylor, professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering
• Bimal Thapaliya, graduate assistant, Department of Mechanical Engineering

The Acoustic Scrubber uses sound vibrations to force nanoscale pollution particles in engine exhaust to stick together, become large and heavy so they fall before reaching the air. Uniquely, this scrubber achieves this using the engine’s own natural noise and vibration, reducing the need for extra equipment or energy to keep industrial engines clean and reducing threats to respiratory health.

Those interested in applying for a future I-Corps Regional Cohort can learn more at Clemson’s I-Corps webpage: https://curf.clemson.edu/icorps/.