Two BU-Created Inventions Are Named “World Changing Ideas”
Fast Company list recognizes projects “driving meaningful change”
Boston University researchers James Galagan (left) and Xin Zhang both helped pioneer inventions honored by Fast Company in its latest World Changing Ideas Awards list.
Two BU-Created Inventions Are Named “World Changing Ideas”
Fast Company list recognizes projects “driving meaningful change”
Two inventions at the cutting-edge of technology and health, both created at Boston University, have been recognized by Fast Company in its 2025 World Changing Ideas Awards list. The BU-fostered innovations—biosensors that can better monitor fertility and a low-cost technology to speed MRI scans—were part of the magazine’s annual celebration of “projects around the world that are pursuing innovation for good.”
BioSens8, a BU-founded start-up developing wearable technology to monitor hormone levels in real time, and the University’s Laboratory for Microsystems Technology (LMST)—which creates devices that boost the effectiveness of MRI scanners without needing more electrical power—were both academic excellence category honorees.
BioSens8 was founded by James Galagan, a BU College of Engineering professor of biomedical engineering, and his student Uroš Kuzmanović (ENG’23), now the company’s CEO. Similar to a glucose monitoring patch, the platform measures hormone levels in real time. The biosensors could be used to continuously monitor hormone fluctuations, like estrogen and progesterone levels, at different phases of fertility to show the ideal timing of administering treatment for in vitro fertilization (IVF). Eventually, this could eliminate the need for time-consuming blood tests at a doctor’s office and simplify the process for those trying to conceive.
LMST creates material structures, called metamaterials, that improve one of modern medicine’s most powerful, but costly, machines—magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners—by using inexpensive parts, like widely available electrical cables and wires. When a metamaterial is placed on a body part before a scan, it can speed up the imaging process and boost image clarity, giving the technology the power to make MRI more accessible to patients around the world. The lab is led by Xin Zhang, a BU College of Engineering Distinguished Professor of Engineering.
To celebrate their pioneering work, The Brink caught up with Galagan and Zhang to learn what makes their inventions world-changing—and what else they hope to accomplish in the future.
Q&A
with James Galagan and Xin Zhang
The Brink: How does it feel to be listed among World Changing Ideas?
Zhang: It’s deeply meaningful for my lab. The aim has always been to develop innovation-infused technologies that solve real-world problems—particularly in healthcare, where the stakes are personal and urgent. This honor reflects the dedication of my students, postdocs, and collaborators—past and present—who have believed in the possibility of making meaningful change. The work we do is grounded in impact: it must be practical, scalable, and accessible. There’s still much to do, but acknowledgments like this give us renewed purpose to keep moving forward—patiently, persistently, and together.
Galagan: It’s great to get this recognition. It made me proud of the work that the team at BioSens8 has done, led by Uroš, my former student who’s now the CEO. He’s doing amazing work and pulled together a great team. This also helps validate the goal we set for ourselves over a decade ago: to build this technology to change the way we interface with our bodies. This work spawned out of my lab when we realized how difficult it is to measure and monitor our own biology. We were inspired by the glucose sensor as a big commercial success, which functions using an underlying biological component—it senses glucose oxidase, a microbial protein that digests glucose and produces a flow of electrons. There was an aha moment when we decided to use genetic tools to identify other microbial proteins to use as sensors. With perseverance, dedication, and many good people over the years, we built something slowly but steadily that can ideally have an impact on people.
The Brink: Can you explain why you believe your lab’s inventions can change the world?
Zhang: The metamaterials developed in my lab are designed to address fundamental limitations in MRI—namely, access, cost, and performance. These lightweight, wearable structures—made from everyday materials like copper wire and coaxial cable—are engineered to boost the signal-to-noise ratio in MRI without increasing magnetic field strength or adding system complexity. They conform comfortably around the region being imaged, whether that’s the head, knee, spine, or extremities. Our metamaterials enable clearer images, faster scan times, and greater patient throughput—especially in settings where MRI resources are limited. What makes our metamaterials so powerful is their simplicity and versatility: they enhance imaging performance without adding burden, making the technology efficient, scalable, and adaptable across a wide range of healthcare environments, from top-tier hospitals to low-resource clinics. By enabling better diagnostics with fewer barriers, I believe our metamaterials can contribute meaningfully to more equitable healthcare around the world.
Galagan: BioSens8’s technology builds on a natural desire and opportunity to be able to measure our health and wellness, and then ultimately intervene to improve it. That’s something I think everybody wants and will benefit from. As of now, none of us can go out and buy a device that can readily and easily measure our hormone levels. Yet, if you think about all of the technology we interface with every day, we understand those systems better than our own bodies; you can get into a plane or a car and there are sensors all around to know what’s going on. We all travel through life in a human body, so we ought to get better at being able to monitor that body. That’s the problem we’re trying to solve. BioSens8 is an example of the value of academia and how government funding opportunities can lead directly to solutions that are going to help everyday people. We’ve been lucky to get funding from multiple sources over the years, with the original seed funding in my lab coming from DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an agency in the US Department of Defense].
The Brink: What do you hope the future brings for your lab and team?
Zhang: I hope to see the metamaterials developed in my lab continue to grow in both impact and reach. We’re refining wireless and wearable metamaterials to support more efficient scan workflows and greater patient comfort in high-throughput clinical settings. In parallel, we are actively extending our metamaterial platform to ultra-low-field MRI systems, which offer tremendous potential for portable, low-cost diagnostic imaging—especially for brain scans and point-of-care applications. To accelerate innovation and customization, we’re also developing computational design tools that enable rapid prototyping of our metamaterials tailored to specific anatomical targets—opening the door to faster, more targeted innovation. But beyond any one design or system, I hope my lab remains a place where curiosity meets purpose, where students and postdocs feel empowered to explore bold ideas, grounded in the belief that science and engineering can serve humanity. Ultimately, my goal is to help create a future where access to high-quality medical imaging is no longer a privilege, but a standard.
Galagan: BioSens8 is on a remarkable trajectory to make a big change in the world. The future excitement, especially from the perspective of an engineer, is that once we can monitor better, then we can start to intervene—not just by preventing diseases, but improving our health and wellness overall. BioSens8 is on the mission to harness this technology for the benefit of reproductive health by helping to address various fertility issues, which can be very complicated and time-consuming as it currently stands. If we can make that process easier, then we’ve achieved our goal.
