The 2025 cohort of the Digital Health Track of the Dartmouth Innovations Accelerator included projects ranging from detecting fractured bones without x-rays to harnessing AI for reconstructive surgery.

Mentorship and feedback from a diverse and talented External Review Panel provided immense value to participants in the most recent DIAC cohort.

They benefited from participating in The Dartmouth Innovations Accelerator for Cancer as graduate students. Now, they’re volunteering to make Dartmouth’s entrepreneurial ecosystem even stronger.

For decades, cancer researchers have been stymied by an elusive challenge: a gene that fuels unchecked cell growth. Myelocytomatosis oncogene (known as MYC) plays a role in most deadly tumors. Yet efforts to develop drugs to rein it in have consistently fallen short.

The innovations include video games for mental health, a tool for providing reputable medical information to patients, and a surgical navigation system.

Tissue engineers at Dartmouth are developing methods to repair, rehabilitate, and replace such damaged tissue. Their work, led by Katie Hixon, PhD, clinical assistant professor of orthopaedics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and assistant professor of engineering at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering, aims to improve the quality of life for patients after cancer treatment.

Lynn Fiellin, MD, had heard it over and over from patients she was treating for addiction and other related conditions: ‘If only I knew as a kid what I know now.’ So Fiellin decided to test that proposition. Could she find a way to effectively communicate adult lessons to children, and in doing so prevent them from ever facing addiction, sexually transmitted infections like HIV, or other negative health outcomes?

cosMYC, a company that grew out of research supported by the Dartmouth Innovation Accelerator for Cancer, is working to identify potential new cancer drugs.