Two Drexel Students Win Prizes at the MD+ Catalyst Fellowship Demo Day
By: Ankith Alluri and Rohan Chandraghatgi
On August 17, 2026, Ankith Alluri, MD '29, and Rohan Chandraghatgi, MD '29, presented products they had spent their summers building to clinician-investors and founders. The presentations were part of Demo Day, the culmination of the MD+ Catalyst Fellowship, a 10-week innovation sprint that pairs teams of medical students with mentors and digital health companies.
To build these products, Alluri and Chandraghatgi relied on agentic coding software — systems that write and revise code from plain-language direction — along with medical-grade AI models and other tools. These were generously gifted by leading tech companies such as Anthropic, Google, Glass Health and other startups.
Alluri built CORE, the Clinical Objective Reasoning Engine, with fellow medical students Jaser Eusuff of New York Medical College and Augustus Isaac of Indiana University School of Medicine. CORE is designed for small-group case discussions, where the majority of preclinical learning happens. In a typical session, a faculty facilitator guides eight students through a single patient case over 90 minutes. When the session ends, nothing from the discussion is captured. Faculty have a general sense of how it went, but they don't know which concepts students understood or whether three separate groups voiced the same misconception.
CORE is software that listens to these discussions and turns them into structured data. It maps what students said against a proprietary library of learning objectives, which shows faculty whether each group covered what the session was meant to teach, and it produces the reports faculty would otherwise write by hand. It also generates objective evidence of what is actually being taught, which is what accreditation review asks schools to document, and what most schools assemble from memory and syllabi after the fact.
CORE has IRB approval to run in live classrooms at Indiana University School of Medicine, the largest public MD program in the country, with plans to expand to other large schools and to build the work into a company.
Chandraghatgi built Thyma with fellow medical students Martha MacDonald of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Alice Yu of Carle Illinois College of Medicine and Sahil Gupta of the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. When rheumatoid arthritis and lupus patients experience flare-ups outside of office hours, they often have few places to turn to other than the emergency room. Some of these emergency room visits are unnecessary, leading to increased costs for patients and strain on emergency departments.
Thyma is a care coordination platform patients can turn to during a flare. Their prototype gathers additional information about a patient's symptoms and history, then summarizes the patient's episode for a provider to review. The provider can then direct the patient on how to manage their episode, whether they need urgent rheumatology care, or if an emergency room visit is warranted.
CORE won Best Trainee-Facing Application, presented by Thalamus, while Thyma won Best Chronic Disease Management Innovation, presented by Chamber Cardio. Both Alluri and Chandraghatgi greatly enjoyed their experience and hope to integrate innovation into their careers, as well as champion similar initiatives at Drexel over the coming years.