From Idea to Reality: Exciting Duke Inventions of 2025

This year’s Invented at Duke event earlier this month brought nine inventor teams under one roof, each showcasing early-stage technologies that blend scientific expertise with practical problem solving to make the world – and the people in it – healthier and safer.   

Dr. Mustafa Bashir and Jacob Macdonald of the Duke University School of Medicine demonstrated an AI-powered software that helps de-identify clinical data for privacy. “We just finished a job with five million images that took our computer two weeks to do, and it would have taken someone working full time eight years to do that data set by hand,” said McDonald. 

That breakthrough was only one example of the inventions on the horizon. Dr. Karl-Dimiter Bissig of the School of Medicine aims to solve one of the greatest barriers in treating inherited liver diseases: the scarcity of transplant organs. By regenerating liver tissue without major surgery, Bissig’s approach could offer patients a curative, transplant-free future. 

From the Pratt School of Engineering, Warren Grill demonstrated a precision nerve-stimulation therapy that targets chronic pain, bladder dysfunction and movement disorders with electrical signals instead of drugs. It’s a promising alternative in a world urgently seeking safer, non-addictive treatments.  

Other projects ranged from robotics in medicine to metamaterials for safer, faster construction. 

The event also demonstrated how it was an opportunity to bring together the like-minded. Among the hundreds of attendees at the event were VQ Biomedical co-founders Tobias Straube and Galen Robertson; VQ Biomedical is developing a minimally invasive catheter to deliver oxygen to patients with respiratory failure. The two shared how the community helped catalyze their path from prototype to company. “[The technology was] featured at Invented at Duke, and that's how I ended up meeting Galen,” said Straube, a pediatrician at School of Medicine. “He’s now my CEO.” 

To learn more about how Duke supports inventors, go to full story on the Office for Translation & Commercialization website.