Organoid/brain slice immobilization for microelectrode arrays (MEAs) and organoid-on-chip platforms have traditionally depended on hydrogels, harp-style grids, or microfluidic confinement, each with its own set of pros and cons with respect to stability, standardization, and impact on electrophysiology. Hydrogels (e.g., Polyethylene glycol or PEG, extracellular matrix like Matrigel) are widely used to immobilize 3D neural tissues on MEAs. These are known to swell, drift, and alter mechanical microenvironments, which in turn modulate network firing, synchrony, and bursting behavior. Mechanical retention via harp slice grids or similar harp devices is a long-standing practice in acute brain slice and organoid electrophysiology. These devices are typically standardized, fragile, and poorly matched to diverse well and tissue geometries. ​Microfluidic organoid chips and specialized 3D MEAs (e.g., e-Flower, organoid-on-chip platforms) have recently emerged to enable hydrogel-free trapping/encapsulation of organoids for imaging and recordings, but they often require bespoke chip designs and overly complex flow control setups. There is a lack of geometry-agnostic devices for mechanically immobilizing diverse organoids on commercial MEAs that feature consistent stability, uniform and/or tailored contact, and with minimal perturbation of electrophysiological readouts.

Quantum‑correlated photon imaging experiments first used pairs of entangled photons so that an image was recovered only from correlations between the two detection paths rather than from either beam alone. Similar correlation and entanglement ideas have been attempted for higher energies and to positron‑annihilation photons, motivating quantum‑based Positron Emission Tomography (PET) concepts in which the additional quantum information carried by annihilation photon pairs could enhance image quality or add new types of contrast beyond conventional PET. In parallel, quantum‑inspired transmission imaging has been proposed as an alternative to Computed Tomography (CT), which today relies on a well‑characterized but fundamentally stochastic X‑ray source, and is limited by Poisson photon statistics, dose requirements, and capped contrast for soft‑tissue. Traditional X‑ray and CT imaging are governed by Poisson statistics, where independent, random photon arrivals make the variance equal to the mean, and has fundamentally bound SNR for a given dose. Research on quantum‑correlated transmission schemes has looked at image formation with higher‑order correlations between photons (rather than simple independent counting) such that performance is no longer capped by standard Poisson statistics, which can in principle lead to superior SNR and sharper anatomical detail at a given dose. To date, quantum‑based X‑ray implementations of this idea have largely relied on spontaneous parametric down‑conversion (SPDC) to generate entangled or correlated photon pairs, but SPDC at X‑ray‑level energies has extremely low conversion efficiency and pair rates—often only a few pairs per second—rendering such medical or biological imaging impractical. Quantum correlation of Annihilation Photon Imaging (QAPI) brings the correlation concepts into a PET‑like regime by using positron annihilation as a bright source of 511 keV gamma‑ray pairs while assuming a transmission‑imaging role similar to CT. QAPI is designed to exploit the strengths of both worlds: unlike CT, it can count the incident annihilation photons via the idler channel and operate in a high‑transmission regime that permits binomial transmission statistics. The PET‑like 511 keV photons introduce challenges that do not exist for CT, including low interaction probability in tissue and detectors, reduced single‑photon detection efficiency, and the need for precise coincidence timing between the signal and idler counts. For any high‑energy, photon-based imaging, including emerging quantum schemes, there is a fundamental tension between dose (especially for biological tissues that are highly susceptible to damage, cell death, or mutation when exposed to ionizing radiation) and the photon statistics needed for adequate SNR. Moreover, the dose‑normalized performance for quantum approaches is still not well established.

The Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) consists of a family of satellite navigation systems (like GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, BeiDou) which provide global positioning and navigation from orbiting satellites. GNSS is one of the major inputs for phone location. Accurate pedestrian localization in “urban canyons” has long been limited by GNSS multipath errors and blocked line-of-sight, especially for blind and low-vision pedestrians who need sidewalk-level accuracy. GNSS-based positioning in dense downtowns is often limited to tens of meters off because skyscrapers block satellites, create multipath, and reduce signal quality, leading to especially large errors that make it hard to know which side of a street a pedestrian is on. For blind and low‑vision users, conventional smartphone navigation (pure GNSS, camera‑based visual positioning system, or beacon infrastructure) does not offer reliable, hands‑free, street‑side-accurate guidance. Most accuracy-focused approaches to date require detailed 3D models, specialized hardware, and/or substantial map annotations, limiting the scalability across urban environments and challenging mainstream apps deployment. Moreover, for blind and low‑vision pedestrians, integrating precise localization with usable, low‑attention interaction (i.e., no constant camera use, minimal screen looks) and robust crossing guidance is still a problem.

Chronic wounds affect over 6.5 million people in the United States costing more than $25B annually. 23% of military blast and burn wounds do not close, affecting a military patient's bone, skin, nerves. Moreover, 64% of military trauma have abnormal bone growth into soft tissue. Slow healing of recalcitrant wounds is a known and persistent problem, with incomplete healing, scarring, and abnormal tissue regeneration. Precise control of wound healing depends on physician's evaluation, experience. Physicians generally provide conditions and time for body to either heal itself, or to accept and heal around direct transplantations, and their practice relies a lot on passive recovery. While newer static approaches have demonstrated enhanced growth of non-regenerative tissue, they do not adapt to the changing state of wound, thus resulting in limited efficacy. One potential unmet clinical need is related to todays rigid form factors. Modern delivery systems lack adequate conformal capability to adapt to complex surfaces (e.g., feet, joints, curved surfaces) where chronic wounds frequently occur. If modern devices have semi-flexible printed circuit boards they have not maintained consistent wound contact during patient movement, leading to variable delivery rates and reduced efficacy.

Chronic wounds affect over 6.5 million people in the United States costing more than $25B annually. 23% of military blast and burn wounds do not close, affecting a military patient's bone, skin, nerves. Moreover, 64% of military trauma have abnormal bone growth into soft tissue. Slow healing of recalcitrant wounds is a known and persistent problem, with incomplete healing, scarring, and abnormal tissue regeneration. Precise control of wound healing depends on physician's evaluation, experience. Physicians generally provide conditions and time for body to either heal itself, or to accept and heal around direct transplantations, and their practice relies a lot on passive recovery. While newer static approaches have demonstrated enhanced growth of non-regenerative tissue, they do not adapt to the changing state of wound, thus resulting in limited efficacy. Advanced wound healing devices generally lack true portability and home-use capability due to bulk, complexity, and/or power requirements. One potential unmet clinical need is the integration of a portable wearable design with modern and sometimes de novo components e.g., specialized microfluidic channels, reliable iontophoretic actuators, and programmable temporal controls.

Antibiotic resistance is a major issue in infectious disease treatment and prevention. In bacteria, the type III secretion system (T3SS) secretes effector proteins in the host cell, allowing the pathogen to infect. The T3SS is largely found on pathogens and not beneficial bacteria, so targeting the T3SS might have an advantage over using classic antibiotics, which disturb the beneficial human microbiome.

Combinatorial encoded library technologies can provide a set of tools for discovering protein-targeting ligands (molecules) and for drug discovery. These techniques can accelerate ligand discovery by leveraging chemical diversity achievable through genetically encoded combinatorial libraries, for example, by combinatorial permutation of chemical building blocks. Although display technologies such as mRNA and phage display use biological translation machinery to produce peptide-based libraries, hits from these libraries often lack key drug-like properties, for example, cell permeability. This limitation can arise from the peptide backbone's inherent polarity and the tendency to select compounds with polar/charged side chains. Backbone N-methylation can increase scaffold lipophilicity in mRNA display; however, codon table constraints can necessitate longer sequences to fully utilize the available space.DNA-encoded libraries (DELs) offer an alternative approach towards discovering hits against drug targets. However, like other encoded library techniques, DELs face significant obstacles in affinity selections, which tend to enrich library members bearing polar and/or charged moieties, which can have low (poor) passive cell membrane permeability, especially in larger molecular weight libraries, resulting in hits with poor drug-like properties. This selection bias is especially problematic for larger constructs beyond the rule of 5, where fine-tuning lipophilicity can be critical. Furthermore, DNA-encoded libraries can be of low quality. Although algorithmic predictions of lipophilicity exist, these two-dimensional (2D) atomistic calculations cannot capture conformational effects exhibited by larger molecules like peptide macrocycles. Despite over a decade of DEL technology development, no method exists to measure physical properties of encoded molecules across an entire DNA-encoded library. That is, successful translation of hits from encoded library selections can be impeded by low quality libraries and enrichment of highly polar members which tend to have poor passive cell permeability, especially for larger molecular weight libraries.DELs are produced through split-pool synthesis with DNA barcoding to encode the building block of each chemical step. Although this approach can draw on a large number of building blocks and allow for the formation of non-peptidic libraries with a large number of members, synthetic challenges persist. The formation of DELs can be synthetically inefficient. Truncations multiply ( are compounded) throughout synthesis, reducing the representation of properly synthesized constructs. Although strategies to improve library purity, to enable reaction monitoring for macrocycle formation, and to identify problematic chemistry affecting DNA tag amplification may be applied, a direct method for assessing DEL quality on a library-wide basis has yet to be developed.   

Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols determine how multiple devices share a single communication channel. This started with Additive Links On-Line Hawaii Area (ALOHA) channel protocol and advanced to Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) protocols, variants of which are used today as WiFi standards. Such random access protocols are generally divided into contention-based methods like ALOHA and CSMA which are simple yet can have collisions at high traffic loads, and contention-free methods like Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) which offer high efficiency but require complex clock synchronization and inflexible time slotting. While distributed queuing concepts have been pitched to help bridge this gap (e.g., DQDB or DQRAP) they have traditionally relied on physical time slots, dual buses, and/or complex signaling that makes them less suitable for the modern demands of wireless networks.