Latest SPARK Award Recipients

Announcing the 2025 SPARK Award Recipients

Thanks to our partners who helped support these projects:

Stanford MCHRI, BioX, Stanford Spectrum, and the Dean’s Office

 

Saranya Chidambaranathan Reghupaty and Katrin Svensson

Title: A novel peptide treatment for obesity and appetite-related disorders

 

Yung-Hao Lin, Jessica Sacher, Ovijit Chaudhuri and Paul Bollyky

Title: Novel phage cocktails to treat skin and soft tissue infections

 

Murtaza Hassan and Kevin Grimes

Title: Developing molecular glue degraders for the treatment of cancer

 

Ivana Maric and David Stevenson

Title: Low-cost, point-of-care tool for early prediction of preeclampsia

 

Jinendra Ekanayake and Gary Steinberg

Title: Prevention of transient neurological episodes in Moyamoya disease patients post-surgery

 

Bo Zhou and Hanlee Ji

Title: Expanded applications of cell free DNA sequencing for non-invasive prenatal testing

 

Kelly Yoo, Michael Lin and Michael Lim

Title: Programmed viruses for brain cancer

 

Zhen Xiao, Manu Prakash, and Jianghong Rao

Title: Rapid, sensitive point-of-care detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis

 

Manon Gourdelier and Shirit Einav

Title: Rescuing diverse ALS forms and other proteinopathies

 

John Hegarty

Title: Transcranial magnetic stimulation for targeting the core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder

 

Daniel Richman and Ron Dror

Title: Synthetic Peptides for Treatment of Acute Myeloid Leukemia and Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia

 

Arash Keshavarzi Arshadi and Euan Ashley

Title: Design of AAV capsids for cardiac tissue delivery

 

Andrea Goldstein-Piekarski and Corey Keller

Title: Optimizing depression treatment through sleep-state brain stimulation

 

George Walters-Marrah, Monther Abu-Remaileh and Polly Fordyce

Title: STRAND: A mix-and-read diagnostic to detect foreign and aberrant DNA

 

Jimin Yoon, Gabriel Tauber, John Shin and Dan Herschlag

Title: Rational design principles for RNA therapeutics

 

Joanna Wysocka, Daniel Jarosz, Shady Saad

Title: Novel approaches for counteracting protein aggregation in neurodegenerative diseases