The Brink: From Better Batteries to Improved Cartilage Repair, BU Ignition Award Winners Aim for Real-World Impact
Excerpt from The Brink | By: Andrew Thurston | Oct. 15, 2025 | Photo: Above Summit for Boston University Photography
The annual Ignition Awards honor innovative BU projects that are ready to make the move toward commercialization, from the research phase to consumer use. 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. There were seven 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.”
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.”