Innovation Spotlight
The Shea Lab’s Immune Monitor: Disease Progression & Treatment Tracking
The Shea Lab’s Immune Monitor is a subcutaneously implantable biomaterial platform that creates a small, engineered “immunological niche” that can be sampled to detect and monitor immune-driven chronic diseases. Many chronic conditions develop slowly and may not be well captured by imaging, blood tests, or occasional biopsies (especially early on) because key immune changes often occur locally within tissues.
How it works and why it matters:
* Creates a defined, non-vital tissue site at a predictable location, enabling repeatable sampling over time
* Continuously recruits immune cells (including rare populations), providing a concentrated readout of immune activity
* Supports disease and treatment monitoring for use cases such as metastatic cancer/immunotherapy response, transplant rejection, and type 1 diabetes
* Demonstrated across multiple applications in published studies, suggesting broad utility as an immune monitoring platform
Email IPInventions@umich.edu with any questions or to discuss licensing, research collaboration, or startup formation opportunities.
Explore the listings below to learn more:
