Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures has announced the recipients of its 2025 President’s Venture Fellowship (PVF) and the Innovation & Entrepreneurship (I&E) Challenge, underscoring the institution’s strategic emphasis on cultivating groundbreaking ideas from its student body. These awards are designed not only to provide essential support and recognition to emerging innovators but also to serve as a critical impetus for ventures poised to address complex real-world challenges.
A notable achievement this year is the unprecedented recognition of women-led teams, who secured both PVF awards—a significant milestone in Johns Hopkins’ ongoing commitment to fostering inclusive innovation within its entrepreneurial ecosystem. The selected ventures exemplify a compelling synthesis of academic rigor and practical application.
Among the distinguished PVF honorees is Fetal Therapy Technologies, a team that has developed a novel port system for fetal surgeries. This initiative, which originated as an undergraduate project, is now poised to advance maternal-fetal care significantly. The second PVF award was granted to Modelus, a team leveraging artificial intelligence to expedite drug development processes. Comprising students from both The Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School and the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering, Modelus is directly addressing inefficiencies inherent in pharmaceutical research and development, promising to streamline the pathway for new therapeutic discoveries.
Fetal Therapy Technologies aims to address the intricate demands of in-utero surgical procedures by providing a more efficient and safer access point for instruments, potentially reducing complications and improving outcomes for both mother and child.
Modelus, for its part, is tackling the notoriously time-consuming and expensive nature of drug discovery by employing advanced AI algorithms to analyze vast datasets, identify promising compounds, and predict molecular interactions. This sophisticated approach is designed to accelerate the identification of viable drug candidates, thereby reducing the significant lead times and costs typically associated with pharmaceutical research and development.
Concurrently, the I&E Challenge has highlighted a diverse portfolio of visionary student-led startups. Each of these ventures is characterized by its inventive approach and resilience in addressing tangible problems, reflecting the depth and breadth of innovative thinking cultivated across the university. Collectively, these awards highlight JHTV’s role in nurturing bold concepts from their foundational stages into scalable enterprises capable of making substantial societal and economic impact.
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