The Fifth Annual Penn Center for Innovation’s Celebration of Innovation was held on December 2, 2020. More than 130 people were in attendance, virtually, to hear from Keynote Speaker Jonathan A. Epstein, Executive Vice Dean and Chief Scientific Officer, Perelman School of Medicine, and hear about the five special award winners. Dr. Epstein spoke about the way Penn Medicine researchers pivoted their work to tackle COVID, from vaccine development to patient care and diagnostic testing. Researchers including Drew Weissman, Cesar de la Fuente, James Wilson, and Ping Wang are all leveraging their work to help in the critical public health fight.

Award recipients at the event were:

Emerging Inventor of the Year: Michel Koo, professor in the department of orthodontics at Penn Dental Medicine, in recognition of his groundbreaking work developing novel approaches to eradicate biofilms (Almanac January 19, 2021).

Inventor of the Year: Saar Gill, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, in recognition of extraordinary innovations allowing expansion of cell therapy to new cell types, new indications and new methods of gene delivery.

Startup of the Year: Cabaletta Bio, a clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on T-cell therapies for B-cell-mediated autoimmune diseases, which in the past year expanded its research partnership with Penn to include three more diseases.

Partner of the Year: Kairos Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Beverly Hills, California, that is focused on scientific discoveries.  In honor of a true innovation champion at Penn, the Partner of the Year Award was renamed for the late Paul D. Sehnert. Mr. Sehnert was the director of real estate development at Penn who helped bring the Pennovation Works campus to fruition. He lost his battle with cancer in 2019 (Almanac May 28, 2019).

Deal of the Year: Exyn Technologies in recognition of its groundbreaking partnership with Sandvik.