One in 10 births in the United States are premature.
The consequences are far-reaching: premature babies face lasting developmental challenges, and families carry emotional and financial burdens that can linger for years. Yet, as George Zeng ’27 points out, clinicians still cannot reliably predict when a mother will give birth, even when she is already in labor.
"They use manual cervical exams," said Zeng, a biomedical engineering student and technical lead of CerviCheck, a Cornell undergraduate research and startup team part of the 2026 cohort of eLab. "Those assessments can vary from clinician to clinician and from mother to mother, making consistency a real challenge. That's where we saw the gap."
CerviCheck is working to change that with a device that translates the cervix's physical properties into a reliable predictor of preterm birth.
The Science Behind the Device
The project traces its origins to the Butcher Lab, where Prof. Jonathan Butcher, biomedical engineering, has long studied tissue biomechanics, or the relationship between mechanical forces and biological tissue.
The foundational challenge, Butcher explained, is that measuring the mechanical properties of living tissue is harder than it sounds. Traditional methods require extracting tissue from the body and pulling the tissue until it breaks, an approach that destroys the very properties being measured after the measurement.
His lab developed an alternative: a device that can measure living tissue — not tissue that has been cut out and drained of its natural fluids — producing data that more accurately reflects how the body actually behaves.
This technology is now being carried forward by the student team leading CerviCheck. The clinical application they homed in on is the cervix. As a mother approaches delivery, the mechanical properties of cervical tissue, like stiffness, change in measurable ways — and right now, clinicians have no objective way to track those changes as manual cervical exams can be subjective.
"[Preterm birth is] fundamentally a biomechanical failure," Butcher said. "The cervix ruptures — that's what birth is. If you could predict that happening quicker or not, you're helping the patient either way."
The stakes of that prediction are higher than they might seem. Currently, women flagged as at-risk are often told simply to go on bed rest, a recommendation that can cost patients their jobs, their leave time and months of anxious waiting.
A reliable mechanical metric could change that: either confirming the risk and enabling targeted therapies to delay labor or clearing women who don't need intervention at all.
CerviCheck's device is designed to deliver that metric. The team operates in both the electrical and mechanical engineering tracks and is currently testing its prototype using cervical tissue sourced through Cornell's veterinary college. Zeng has also been in close contact with clinicians at Weill Cornell Medicine, namely Dr. David Downing, an OB-GYN whose input has helped the team keep clinical application at the center of its engineering.
From Scientists to Entrepreneurs
Validating a prototype, however, is only part of the challenge. Translating research into a clinical product means navigating a world that operates by entirely different rules — markets, funding, regulatory approval, intellectual property — and CerviCheck's team learned that the hard way.
Charlotte Wu ’28, who joined as a mechanical engineer before transitioning to the business side, recalls the moment the team's perspective shifted. After an early advisory board meeting through Cornell's eLab startup accelerator program, the feedback was direct: the science sounded promising, but the team knew nothing about whether it could actually reach patients.
"We were hardcore scientists through and through," Wu said. "We sat down and realized we needed to think of our project in a completely new way."
That realization set the team on a new course. They began conducting customer discovery in earnest, speaking with hundreds of mothers, clinicians, hospital administrators and other startups to understand the landscape. Wu spent part of her summer going door to door, speaking directly with mothers who had experienced preterm births.
"Reading about 10% preterm birth is a lot different from talking with [the mothers]," she said, "and hearing about how both the mothers and the children have continued to live with the consequences."
Wu now oversees four distinct functions on the business side: clinician and administrator outreach, market research and financial modeling, Food and Drug Administration regulatory strategy and intellectual property defense.
Looking ahead, the team is preparing to present to investors at several upcoming competitions and industry events, while continuing to build relationships with clinicians and hospital administrators who will ultimately determine whether the device finds its way into labor and delivery wards.
Women's Health is Human Health
For many members, the decision to join CerviCheck was personal.
Wu came in with a background in women's health advocacy, having spent much of high school working to improve access to menstrual products in her community. Later through classes at Cornell, she learned that clinical research has historically defaulted to male subjects, leaving gaps in what science understands about conditions that affect women.
Nathan Briard ’28, who joined the mechanical team in his freshman spring, arrived through a different path. A background working in a hospital near his home in Texas gave him an early window into the realities of women's healthcare.
"Women's health is human health," Briard said. "A lot of the ailments that happen during pregnancy affect more people than you initially realize. Ten percent of births is still one in 10 people, regardless of sex."
Zeng, who grew up working on a cattle farm and witnessed animal births and stillbirths firsthand, came to the project through Butcher's research and a conversation about the broader applicability of soft tissue biomechanics — a technology with potential uses ranging from cancer screening to agricultural applications.
"The idea is so broadly applicable," he said. "We honed in on preterm birth after doing customer discovery, because the market was clear and the need was urgent."
What Comes Next
On the engineering side, the team's immediate goal is to conduct tests with animal tissues through Cornell's veterinary college, with generous support from the de Mestre lab — a critical step in the translational pipeline that moves from cell work to animal models before eventually reaching human clinical trials. Continued prototype development and outreach to researchers at other institutions interested in biomechanics are also on the team’s near-term agenda.
Wu was candid about how much remains ahead. FDA certification, investor outreach and building a defensible IP portfolio are all active priorities. But she was equally clear about what has made the journey possible so far.
"It wouldn't be possible without the Cornell environment around us," she said. "From our [principal investigator] to the entrepreneurship community to the vet school to Weill Cornell — none of this would have happened without that network."
For Wu, though, the motivation never strays far from the people the device is meant to serve.
"The most fulfilling part is knowing you're doing something that could end up changing someone's life tremendously," she said, "especially for those moms who have had preterm births and still live with those experiences today."
