Carys Cares, a student-led venture that strives to end the social stigma of special needs children and teenagers in Indonesia through creative empowerment, is the 2023 winner of the Thorne Prize for Social Innovation in Health or Education.
Winners of the annual Thorne Prize receive a $25,000 cash award. The Thorne Prize is the signature competition of InnovateHealth Yale, a program housed at the Yale School of Public Health that supports students who develop innovative solutions to health and education challenges in underserved communities in the United States and low-resource countries.
This year, the Thorne Prize cash award was given to Carys Mihardja, YC ’26, who founded Carys Cares in 2018.
The Thorne Prize was one of two top awards presented by InnovateHealth Yale during Yale’s annual celebration of student entrepreneurship – Startup Yale 2023 – on March 30 and 31st. Startup Yale celebrates Yale student innovation in an intense two-day event in which students vie for top prizes by pitching their ideas and receiving feedback from experienced professionals, capital investors, and industry leaders.
The second award from InnovateHealth Yale – The Rita Wilson Prize Fund in Support of Innovation and Entrepreneurship – was presented to the best student-led venture offering a technological solution that addresses a health disparity in the U.S. The 2023 winner of the $10,000 Rita Wilson Prize was Ensight-AI, which uses artificial intelligence to detect signatures of disease on electrocardiograms or through wearable technology.
Here is more information about the top two prize winners:
Carys Cares
Carys Cares is a social retail enterprise that sells a wide range of lifestyle creations (bags, shirts, pouches, notebooks, mugs, etc.) curated and designed from artwork by members of the Down Syndrome community. Carys Cares maintains a sustainable business model while donating 100% of its profits to POTADS, a Down Syndrome foundation, and to support individuals with Down Syndrome and their families in Indonesia.
With a presence in Indonesia’s largest department stores (SOGO), other retail outlets, and seasonal appearances throughout Southeast Asia – as well as an online store with 38,000 followers – Carys Cares has raised more than $168,000 in sales. Those funds have impacted over 20,000 families with Down Syndrome children in 15 cities across the archipelago.
In addition to its retail business, Carys Cares has launched an internship and career matching program that has helped connect 152 Down Syndrome individuals with internship programs and job opportunities throughout Indonesia – including securing partnerships within the food and beverage, and hospitality sectors in the Capital City of Jakarta –as well as securing internships with Indonesia’s national airline, Garuda Indonesia.
Ensight-AI
Ensight-AI represents a new paradigm in cardiovascular diagnosis through the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to electrocardiograms (ECGs). Key cardiovascular diseases that affect large portions of the population worldwide and have been the focus of drug development require advanced cardiac imaging for diagnosis as well as treatment monitoring.
Most people remain undiagnosed, and monitoring becomes cost prohibitive for those that can receive therapies. Ensight-AI’s custom and proprietary AI models can detect signatures of disease directly from photos of ECGs or wearable technology, the most widely available cardiovascular screening tools.
In submitting their application for the prize competition, Ensight-AI’s leaders – Veer Sangha, YC ’23, a Rhodes Scholar and undergraduate student researcher in Yale’s Cardiovascular Data Science Lab, and Dr. Rohan Khera, a Yale cardiologist, – said their innovation “has the potential to transform cardiovascular disease diagnosis.”
“Hundreds of thousands of patients in the United States and millions around the world have heart disease that is treatable with current pharmacotherapy and management,” the application said. “The vast majority of patients are diagnosed too late. Ultimately, our goal is to bridge the gap between proven effective treatments and the patients who need them the most.”