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From Campus to Commercialization: I-Corps Journeys @ UMass Chan is a collaborative storytelling series between founders and our storyteller-in-residence at UMass Chan Medical School. This series shares the impact of I-Corps programming on startup founders during their tech ideation phase that contributed to their subsequent startup success.

Customer discovery and interviews are a core component of I-Corps philosophy. From Campus to Commercialization aims to illustrate how customer discovery often dramatically influences and improves a founder’s approach toward developing and launching their successful startup, in addition to informing founders about their markets.

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Dr. Andrés Colubri brings a uniquely interdisciplinary perspective to academia by way of his unconventional background. After completing a PhD in mathematics and making contributions to the field of computational biology, Andrés took a detour into media arts with the goal of merging code, technology, and his science training in the arts. Eventually, he made his way back to academic research with a new point of view and a creative lens that he could apply to his research regarding infectious disease and outbreak response.

Andrés joined the Fall 2025 Cohort of I-Corps@UMass Chan with the intent of applying multiple ideas from his career together to pursue a wider impact beyond conducting biomedical research and publishing science papers. Ideally, he wanted to take his research and build a digital platform that addresses the spread of infectious diseases, including antimicrobial resistance, by providing travelers with a useful app to maintain their health while on a trip.

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Andres Colubri, MFA, PhD Assistant Professor, UMass Chan Medical School Founder, Travel Healthy

Michelle Mosqueda, PhD Medical Affairs Data Specialist, Lantheus

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Hey Andrés! Hey Michelle! I had the pleasure of working with both of you and have a rough idea of what brought you both to I-Corps@UMass Chan. But do you mind giving a brief background of what made you interested in this program?

Andrés: One thing that happened before we started I-Corps is that my work was picked up by the BRIDGE Office to be part of their IMPACT Portfolio. Through that program, I was paired with an investor/VC who initially seemed excited when we talked. But over time, these conversations kind of deflated and lost momentum. This same thing happened a few more times with other people, where there was a lot of excitement at the beginning and then it would fade away. I think that the main problem is that I didn’t really know how to transition from talking about the research to having a real business conversation during those meetings. But I knew this was something I wanted to keep working on since the travel industry is huge, and the public health impact of a product like this could be very substantial. People don’t think about getting sick on a trip until it happens, and that’s exactly the problem we want to solve.

Michelle: I was doing research for my PhD, but I’ve always been interested in startups and commercialization. I was involved with the consulting club at UMass, and that helped me with understanding some aspects of business development for biotech. I also went to a lot of events through both Startup Boston and MBI to learn more about startups because I wanted to learn about things outside of research and UMass.

If I remember correctly, you two met and were able to work together because of our Fall 2025 cohort, right?

Michelle: That’s correct! I was interested in doing I-Corps after learning about it, but I didn’t have an idea myself. I learned that I could join a team through matchmaking if I didn’t have an idea because there are teams that do have an idea that are interested in working with additional people. Through that process, I was able to meet Andrés and start working on Travel Healthy. It’s been great because he cares a lot about the science but also considers things like, how the app looks, the user experience, and its ease of use. Also, for me personally, I love to travel, and I agree with Andrés that being sick during travel is very overlooked.

Even though we don’t require teams to continue working together after matchmaking for a cohort, we hope that we can foster new collaborations that will last after a cohort ends. It’s really cool to hear about how you’re doing and have been working together since fall of last year! Both of you seem startup-minded prior to I-Corps, so what did you learn or feel was the main takeaway?

Michelle: I learned a lot about how to refine a startup idea more. I had exposure to these concepts through the other activities I did, but you learn a lot more about what’s going on in this market today vs. higher level concepts about business development.

Andrés: I think for me through this program I learned how to create an actual product that makes sense as a business from something that was first conceived only for research purposes, which is the case of the Travel Healthy app (by the way, you can learn more about the research by reading this online article I wrote when we were starting with the project). The customer shifted from individual travelers to selling this product to other businesses. I realized this isn't just an app for people to use on vacation, but travel clinics, travel agencies, and even biotech companies could be interested in it.

As an instructor, I remember you initially framing the idea that way during the cohort.

Andrés: Right, this process made me realize that there is a much larger universe of potential customers. For example, an online travel agency could use aggregate travel health trend data from our platform to respond proactively by adjusting recommendations or travel packages in response to emerging outbreaks. And on the biotech side, companies that develop vaccines for diseases that commonly affect travelers, like chikungunya and typhoid fever, could potentially use a platform like ours to reach the right populations when they need to run clinical trials or post-market studies.

Wow! That’s a huge shift from what you were talking about when we were originally working together during cohort.

Andrés: A lot of those ideas are also newer because we’ve been doing customer discovery since the cohort ended last fall. We think we have two potential groups of customers, but we need to now test these ideas for the National I-Corps.

Yes, you quite literally just got the notice of award for National I-Corps this morning, and you’re going to be part of the Fall #3 Cohort!

Andrés: Yeah, this is very exciting! We’re looking forward to national I-Corps even though we know it’s going to be a lot of work in a very short amount of time. The funds we received to be in the cohort are critical since they allow us to attend high-profile conferences that are quite costly and basically trade shows for the travel industry. Beyond the customer discovery interviews we need to do during the national program, these events are also where potential investors and partners tend to show up, so it’s a great opportunity on multiple fronts.

For sure, I totally understand how helpful the big meetings are for getting a lot of customer discovery interviews done. My team leader and I had to do the same thing when I was part of a national I-Corps team last fall. Now that you’ve finished up a regional cohort and are prepping for an upcoming national program, is there anything you feel like I-Corps changed about your approach to startup development?

Andrés: I think I-Corps gave me the framework to keep doing customer discovery. I had meetings where the topic came up naturally, and I ended up having very productive conversations like discussing what would be actually useful for a travel agency from a platform like this, or how it would integrate into existing systems. Those interactions helped me test business hypotheses and gain valuable insights. The reality is, I’ve been doing customer discovery nonstop since last November. It’s almost like it’s… sorry, I’m trying to figure out how to phrase this.

[laughs] I know exactly what you mean. It’s like I-Corps helps you build a customer discovery muscle, and you end up flexing it all the time, even if you’re just hanging out.

Andrés: Yes! That’s it. This whole process so far has taught me how to keep refining a concept, keep building. And if you’re building a startup, it’s a skill you’ll need. You need to be highly attuned to the needs of customers. I still see a mobile health solution for travelers, but this process is teaching us how to build a business model from that. It’s also teaching us to be ready to pivot if we learn that our current value proposition has a low market fit.

Absolutely. Before we wrap for the day, any last words?

Michelle: Something I want to highlight is that for students and postdocs, it’s never too late to attend meetings outside of your area of expertise. I was doing my specific research for my PhD, but as I was finishing up, I wondered if I was going to work on this beyond my dissertation. Trainees should aim to bring those outside explorations that bring you closer to other career paths sooner rather than later.

Andrés: I’ll leave you with a little anecdote. Back in 2010, I got sick while traveling abroad, and the hardest part was trying to figure out how to find trustworthy health resources in the middle of the trip. Eventually I got better, and I suspected it was H1N1 because the main symptom was a fever like I never experienced before. But I don’t know for sure if I had it or not because I wasn’t able to get tested. This is something that happens to a lot of people because about 30% of people get sick while traveling. That whole experience probably would’ve been better if I had a way of dealing with this health issue, even if that was simply obtaining accurate information on how to get a test at that time. In other words, I would have used Travel Healthy back in 2010 if I had had it!

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