CoFlo Medical’s plan for faster, cheaper drug injection wins MIT $100K

CoFlo Medical, an MIT-based startup that developed a faster and lower-cost device for injecting biologic drugs, won the Danny Lewin Grand Prize at the 2025 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition on May 12. The company’s injector could increase access to treatment and significantly reduce injection times for patients with cancer and autoimmune diseases.

CoFlo’s device can inject highly viscous drugs, enabling rapid subcutaneous injection for patients who might otherwise require intravenous infusions lasting up to eight hours in a hospital setting, at a cost of $100 to $1,000 per dose. That “makes biologics all but impossible in remote and low access areas,” co-founder and CEO Simon Rufer, PhD ’25, told judges during the competition’s final round, held on the MIT campus.

To inject drugs subcutaneously, CoFlo’s injector surrounds the viscous drug with a second, lower viscosity fluid. Rufer said this can cut injection time to seconds and the cost of injection to less than $20. The patented device was developed over six years at MIT. The startup is working with three pharmaceutical companies on six drugs. There is also interest from “device manufacturers, hospitals, and institutions, all who are excited to commercialize this with us,” Rufer said. CoFlo expects its first commercial sales in 2028.

Rufer co-founded CoFlo with Vishnu Jayaprakash, PhD ’21, and Kripa K. Varanasi, an MIT professor of mechanical engineering. Rufer is minoring in business at MIT Sloan, where Jayaprakash also minored.

The grand prize is $100,000. Other winners at the competition were: 

• Haven, a financial planning platform using artificial intelligence to help families plan for lifelong special needs care. The startup won the $50,000 David T. Morgenthaler Founder’s Prize.
• AortaScope, an AI-enabled platform using ultrasound to create augmented reality guidance for vascular surgery. The startup won the $5,000 third place prize.
• Flood Dynamics, a platform using AI and analytics to provide real-time, infrastructure-scale modeling and risk assessment for flood resilience. The startup won the $5,000 audience choice prize.

The MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition started in 1989 and has served as the springboard for a variety of successful startups, including HubSpot and Akamai. Other MIT $100K startups have been acquired by companies such as Oracle, Cisco, 3M, and Merck.

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