Maria Intscher-Owrang is the co-founder and CEO of Simplifyber, a Raleigh-area materials startup that molds cellulose-based liquid directly into finished textile and composite parts, eliminating spinning, weaving, cutting and sewing. After more than two decades designing for Vera Wang, Calvin Klein, Dirk Bikkembergs and Alexander McQueen, she left luxury fashion to rebuild manufacturing from the fiber up, landing partnerships with GANNI and Kia and a $12M Series A led by Suzano Ventures.

SweetBio, Inc. is a Memphis-based medical device company that bioengineers manuka honey into solid, easy-to-apply wound dressings. Its flagship product, APIS, combines a collagen derivative, UMF-certified manuka honey, and hydroxyapatite into a trimmable sheet that is FDA-cleared and Medicare-covered for managing chronic and acute wounds, including diabetic foot ulcers. Founded in 2015 by sibling co-founders Kayla Rodriguez Graff and Dr. Isaac Rodriguez, the woman-led, Latinx-founded company aims to make advanced wound care accessible and affordable - taking a remedy as old as the ancient Egyptians and delivering it in a modern, standardized form.
Caralynn Nowinski Collens is a physician-turned-entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Dimension Bio (formerly Dimension Inx), a Chicago biotechnology company building regenerative therapeutics that give the body a blueprint to heal itself. Its BioNidum platform fuses materials science, 3D-printing, and digital manufacturing to turn cells into implantable, tissue-like therapies. Before biotech, she spent eight years co-founding and running UI LABS, the innovation collaborative that launched MxD, the U.S. national hub for digital manufacturing. She trained as an M.D./MBA at the University of Illinois at Chicago and has been recognized on Crain's Forty Under Forty, Tech 50, and Notable Women in STEM lists.
Luis Alvarez is the founder and CEO of Theradaptive, a Frederick, Maryland biotech engineering proteins that latch onto implants and surgical materials to trigger the body to regrow bone, cartilage, and other tissue exactly where it is needed. A retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and MIT-trained biological engineer, he traced the idea back to a combat tour in Iraq, where soldiers under his command lost limbs to delayed amputations. Theradaptive has since won multiple FDA Breakthrough Device Designations, raised more than $43 million, and moved its lead protein, AMP2, into human clinical trials.
Adaptilens is a pre-clinical biotechnology company in Newton, Massachusetts developing the first biomimetic accommodating intraocular lens (A-IOL) - a soft, flexible artificial lens that responds to the eye's natural focusing signal from the ciliary muscle. Founded by ophthalmologist Dr. Liane Clamen, the company aims to replace the cataract-clouded natural lens with one that restores clear vision across near, intermediate, and distance ranges without glasses, contacts, or the halos and glare common to multifocal alternatives. Adaptilens raised a $17.5M Series A in April 2024 to advance its A-IOL toward first-in-human trials.
Dimension Bio (formerly Dimension Inx) is a Chicago-based regenerative therapeutics company that turns living cells into implantable, tissue-like therapies. Its BioNidum platform fuses materials science, 3D printing, and digital manufacturing to build three-dimensional microenvironments that help transplanted cells survive, vascularize, and function in the body. A Northwestern University spinout, the company already brought the first FDA-cleared 3D-printed regenerative bone graft (CMFlex) to patients and is now aiming its lead program at acute liver failure - building an engineered, mini-liver-like therapy to stabilize patients and give their own organs a chance to recover.
Michael (Mike) J. McShane is a biomedical engineer who has spent close to 25 years trying to put readable chemistry under the skin. As James J. Cain Professor II and head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University, he builds injectable, biomaterials-based optical biosensors - often called 'smart tattoos' - that glow in response to glucose, oxygen and other body chemistries so doctors can monitor patients continuously and minimally invasively. A Fellow of IEEE, SPIE, BMES and AIMBE, past president of the IEEE Sensors Council and founding chair of the IEEE BioSensors conference, he won the 2012 NIH Director's Transformative Research Award and the 2023 IEEE Sensors Council Technical Achievement Award.