Student team led by Nano Kojima and others in the “Medicine × Engineering” field wins 3rd place at the Bright SCIdea Challenge 2026

Team MediKeto—comprising Yuri Fujikura, a third-year medical student in the School of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, at Institute of Science Tokyo (Science Tokyo); Eleina Yuka Haymes; and Nano Kojima, a first-year doctoral student (PhD) in the Department of Transdisciplinary Science and Engineering, School of Environment and Society—won third place at the international innovation pitch contest for university students, “Bright SCIdea Challenge 2026,” held in the United Kingdom on March 17.

This contest is an international competition hosted by the Society of Chemical Industry (SCI), founded in 1881, in which participants compete to commercialize scientific ideas that can help solve societal challenges. Student teams from around the world take part. This year, 32 student teams entered and, after receiving training provided by the organizers, submitted business plans to bring their original ideas to market. Following the judging process, six teams advanced to the final round and competed in the championship event in the United Kingdom.

The team’s collaboration began after an outreach message on the university’s Slack. Members from different specialties came together, pooling their expertise to launch this project.

Development theme: Dietary therapy app for drug-resistant epilepsy

The three members are developing a ketogenic diet therapy support app to assist patients with drug-resistant epilepsy.
Specifically, in addition to enabling patients and their families to easily record and manage daily meals, the app includes features such as automatic calculation of the ketogenic ratio, presentation of the necessary nutritional balance, and meal plan suggestions—making it easier to practice the highly specialized and difficult-to-sustain ketogenic diet therapy in everyday life. Ketogenic diet therapy is a dietary treatment in which carbohydrate intake is restricted and fat intake is increased to generate “ketone bodies” in the body and use them as an energy source for the brain. As it has been shown to suppress seizures in drug-resistant epilepsy, it is also covered by insurance.

By integrating medical knowledge with an engineering approach, the team aims to put this into practical use as a digital tool that supports continued treatment—an initiative that truly embodies “medical–engineering collaboration.”

Taking on the UK final

At the final competition held in London, selected teams from around the world took the stage to present their research and commercialization plans.
Among them, Science Tokyo’s Team MediKeto earned third place, recognized for its solid proposal grounded in real clinical challenges and its high feasibility for implementation through the integration of medicine and engineering.

Comment from Kojima

Although we did not win first place, we are proud that we achieved third place in the judges’ vote and second place in the audience vote. We believe this was because our project has a strong narrative that resonates with a broad audience, and we were able to demonstrate it fully in the actual presentation.

In this project, I feel that I have been able to make great use of what I learned in the Zhu Xinru Laboratory and the Nohara Kayoko Laboratory in the School of Environment and Society to which I belong—particularly in developing the app as a communication medium that connects people across different domains, including healthcare professionals involved with the product, patients and their families, and researchers.

Going forward, we hope to bring our strengths to fruition—connecting clinical practice and research, maintaining high expertise in related fields, and developing software with accessible, intuitive design and usability based on these very robust foundations—in a way that supports the daily lives of people with drug-resistant epilepsy (and their families).

Finally, as a person living with epilepsy, I am truly delighted that a project like this exists, that I am involved in it as an engineer, and that we were able to achieve results in this competition. I would like to take this opportunity to once again thank the team and all stakeholders who have supported us. Thank you very much.

Toward global expansion of medical–engineering collaboration

At Science Tokyo, we promote initiatives that integrate knowledge from diverse fields—including medicine, dentistry, science, and engineering—to help address societal challenges.

This award not only demonstrated the potential of medical–engineering collaboration to the world, but also stands as a symbolic achievement of young researchers succeeding on the international stage.

Further developments are anticipated.

*Reprinted (excerpted) from the “Science Tokyo News” section of the university website.
(Reprinted from the following site)
https://www.isct.ac.jp/ja/news/8o17grt8bm8s